for Josie
That jazz show raised the dead
They danced like the bones of music
The music was pumping blood
Animating their dust into flesh
That music was shooting guns
Into the streets of being alive
Drums unsettled the serpents
The earth opened under them
Trumpets were speaking
In the tongues of angels
The sax deep-kissed a lover
Until both felt the rapture
Over the devil of time
The bassist thrashed at a rhythm
And the piano lifted all her legs
Like a spider dancing on a web
Nature is already in preparation
The sky puts down large blankets
For the sun to lay its head
Hospitals plan for the abandonment
Wiccans gather in circles
Scientists mark the minutes
In black books no one will see
Birds will fly into the penumbra
Like ashes from a dead fire
Statues of faith will be blinded
Gabriel will blow his trumpet
Somewhere a war won’t end
Everywhere people are suffering
Some will become zombies
As though in the occultation
Five minutes of fentanyl
Will occlude eternity for all
Are like prisoners of life
The minute born is time served
They crash imaginary borders
To enter the freedom of a cage
They are like the dust of Gaza
The diseased of the desert
The displaced of war
And untraced of genocide
The unloved and innocent
Are enemies of entitlement
The poor and the unloved
Share an address in a living hell
They are like the unborn
Bearing our burden
Yellow eyes of an eyelash viper
The sun in a coil
Seeds in the lotus
A venomous flowering of vision
Fruit with fangs
Our guide stops my hand
From reaching for the illusion
After my father cut my hair
I swept up the clippings
Something about doing that
The peace of it
The closeness
The sweeping motion
Of my mind
Made me think I’d existed
Many times before
And so did I and I
Crawls from the carnage of hearts
From desperation and pain
Lucky to have survived
Not to have chosen death
Not to have been seduced again
It sings from all we’ve destroyed
No matter how many lies
The voice of a song
Is the part you remember
The part you hear
When you’re not listening
Out of pity it sings to you
It serenades the beast inside
And it never stops bleeding
for Len
“What do you think of Orpheus’ lyre?”
“What does it mean to play so well
You draw the animals from the forest
Into the energy of your art?” Len asked
After a day of bourbon and holy smoke,
After hours of creating poetry in conversation,
Finding sanity in beauty, and refuge in rhetoric.
Finally I said, “maybe it was a weapon.”
Len paused, looked at me for a long time
And said, “yeah, man, it was a weapon.”
Red like the sun bleeding
Green like leaves born of nothingness
Blue like the inside of light
Spilling over the sky
And yellow
Doomed by black to shine with rot
And black
Like a massacre of accountants
And white
Like its own crucifix on a vast wall
(September 2, 1939 – September 7, 2005)
Punch a ghost
And you fall through an abyss.
Jab repeatedly at a shadow
And you beat your own brains
Against nothingness.
Throw your hardest left and miss
Stumbling through your momentum
Like a puppet come unstrung
To miss again with your right
Until it seems
You’re in a self-defeating fight.
That was the genius of Nicolino Locche,
“The untouchable one.”
He fought by not fighting
And even losing, he won.
Salvatore Ala 