Under a Web of Branches Her Sex Doll
Does anyone see the ultimate paradox?
In a grown child’s broken toy, I mean
Out old hands cannot mend
Or bring life back to
The baby sex doll, spinning no more:
Sunlight once braided innocent glints
Through her auburn hair
Curled with the root of trees
So dirt-bitten, so acrid once
Before apples bloomed in wayward winds
The sky opens above us.
Yet mind this sight: does one hear
Her broken dolly actually speaking
Those once digitally-chipped words
Forming lyrics of some dirty nursery song,
So high in the trees’ intricacy
Where branches mesh in mystery
& sway with nature’s first music
Seeding love on the sheltering sky?
The Sacrificial Apron
The sin on my mother’s soiled apron
Never astounded me. Covered in bestial blood
Meat butchers take for granted,
She wears this map variegated
With raw animal guts blotting
Slowly over her ample midriff
This besmirched, once white cloth covering
Scars of a wanton C-section.
From birth to death I’m rising,
& writhing behind her sacred shroud
Her life’s pain imprints with a savior’s face
Into rotund shadows
Flecked with blood-bits of transcendent slime
She shares each morning with fowls slain
Over the cooking table.
The butcher’s knife incises the indecipherable
Glyphs & symbols of a sacrificed existence.
Whatever bespeaks the pitfalls of life hungering
Those lips kiss the stigmata of flesh
Her own body will eat in eternity.
Raw Dog Renascent
Saw U
On the winding
Road
Stomping jazz notes out with hip-hop boots
Night music’s fly-up
Beneath your heels,
Before mystery dawn unfolds
Don’t go where time stands still
Beyond the bus stops of delusion
On the street young people skate
& bike cool down with phones & radios
Blaring messages of the rapper’s last testament
The street is your brother
Yet the desert roads sing in winding rhythms to
The raw dogs wandering with you tonight
Shattering the dust like a veil once lowering itself
Comes the BOOM sounds over heads of dead fathers
In the temporal window of aural deceits
With mulatto tones of variegated lusts
I sing to disciples of the depressed nocturne
(& to those bullied down by unfair fortune,
Into some unfathomable silence
Bottomless with crevices
Of the forgotten soulfulness
& spider-lurking nooks nefarious
Only the epitome of toughness, dogs!)
Still dumb yet ancient with agelessness
Overtaking my song’s riff & speech,
What once shouted out daily now shorted out
By the voiceless stigma of the lonely damned
Congregating in drinking groups by the boulevard
Broken-down chipped & concrete fence
Bearing the lost faith of graffiti
Just more notes tagged on my windpipe
Strangulating syllables of once gospel sounds
Too graceful for the fallen-forbearing.
Cutting light from the chiaroscuro coffins round me
The street’s cavern filled itself with deaf beggars
Begetting the mute tongue of losers, louts, everyday
Lepers for their typical cluster-fuck of aimlessness
Tripping your skateboard into society’s spieling
Wall of dread bearing the crushed-butterfly
Skeletons of those martyrs of our stricken race
Now you cannot fathom
The many-gendered thing
Living inside you:
The fetus of regenerated spirit
The street’s spell cast over you
Month after month, night after night
No longer the prisoner of yourself
Caught in the spotlight of police vans.
Not just a raw dog N-word now
But a being of swag to be more real
Than those silent fools beneath your woke
Floundering through the macadam jungle
Digging thru dumpsters for gourmet crud;
Now you’re disdaining all police
Daring to mess with you, proud boy
With painted face of the tattooed revenant
Smeared with the holy water of street grime
& the hooker’s perfume of piss:
(Sing painting blood on faces you hate
Slashing their flesh with your serration of love,
Cutting free their spirits to rise at last
Across time & the asphalt’s pockmarked river).
There you take the rose from the teeth
Of the tripping whore with wise eyes
Who kneels before you transformed
By your new beauty of bitchin’ grace,
No longer in need of just blood money
Like your dead mother now she sees your flesh
As hers between the ivory of blessed teeth
& lips succoring you, eating the host of all
The many genders your sanctified Sex now is
As Spirit rekindled with a patchwork censer
Or whatever else her hallucination brings
Taking you to the gates of fallen heavens
As the coming white noise drapes itself
In audible signals from a lost asteroid
Around you, vibes mildewing no more
Through musky closets trapping you,
Where you’ve hoarded everything pilfered
From the deranged street woman in your soul
Peddling her begrimed Walmart cart
As sister Hooks does with her sticker-festooned
& whirling handicap scooter down Twain Ave.
Every night, well into this hallowed morning
Purling rhapsodies of Rap to stricken sorts
& neon cats once waiting to pounce
On the piecemeal offering of your brain –?
So then show us yourselves, Raw Dogs
Unwinding old time, a clock without hands
Signaling a new god’s resplendent illumination …
Dumpster Fire Press 