Corona Senryu III

The president said
He heard bleach kills the virus.
Deaths by poison rise.

Corona Senryu II

With beards and long hair,
Men protest the shutdowns, but
Later call doctors.

Corona Haiku VI

Worshippers chanting,
The pastor praising God's cure.
From the back pew: coughs.

Vegas Haiku I

Thundering gunfire,

Fireworks raining from the sky –

Run! He said, then fell. 

The Morning After

I woke up at 4:00 am today, unable unable to sleep. Rain fell outside. Was God crying? Or urinating on us all? How could a compassionate, just God sanction this election?  Most Christian Evangelicals voted for Trump, a complete betrayal of their religious beliefs. In their hypocritical hearts, they know Trump's religious gestures are mere theater. Never has it been more tempting to boldly proclaim the virtue of atheism.

A panic attack kept me awake. Vaguely, I recall the fear constrict my chest and knew instinctively that it was the same fear Trump's supporters felt. They surrendered to this animalistic drive, irrational by nature, at the polls yesterday. It was an epiphany: understanding this fear was a key to penetrating the dark, unspeakable mystery of our national political climate. How each of us responds to this fear individually will affect the course of our country, and in turn, the world.

I dressed for work as if for a funeral, all in gray - gray suit, gray tie, gray shirt - gray like the cloudy day that was dawning and still I moved about as if in a bad dream, slowly.  To deny reality is human. Uneducated racists do not have a monopoly on denial. But my clock kept ticking. Because I could accept the possibility that I would be late for work, I admitted I was awake. I had lived through what history will record as our worst election for all its resemblance to 1932 Germany.

Stepping outside, the fear subsided but still lingered. It cast a small shadow in me, like the shadow of leaves on pavement after the rain.  What I did with this fear was my own burden. So I secured the fear, until I could regain my reason, by using a talisman.

I dressed in mourning because something died last night, a grand experiment on tolerance unique in history.  But I placed a small, white handkerchief in my breast jacket pocket. The Christians - the authentic ones - have a story about Jesus who survived death and will one day return. Only their hope sustains that story. The thin, white line in my breast pocket was my own talisman of hope. Perhaps America will return from death some day. And perhaps how we vanquish the animal fear will usher the resurrection. But for today I just need to touch the white fabric often, to navigate the sadness until I can again think.

Worldwide Web

You can project
Your content here:
Your hope, your fear. 

This space can be
Your preferred candidate,
Your Superman,
Your Jesus. 

What you want me to be, I cannot,
Because I already am. 

In my mind there is a land
Where we can walk together.
Flowers in a field gathered;
Like us, they sway and dance,
Sprung from seeds scattered
By the fickle winds of chance.

 

 

Fallout Shelter

The children were asked to hide
In the classroom storage closets.
In the wide open air,
Bullets could fly
Under each desk,
Under each chair,
To hit a student hiding there.

Bullets could fly
Through large plastic boxes
For holding the toys,
Now turned on their side,
To hide little boys.

Bullets could fly
Through yellow fans
And music stands,
Through picture books
And coats on hooks.

Better instead to hide in the closets,
The two large closets,
That made the world dark, and warm,
And fun:

The game of fear had just begun.

Drywall could not simply stifle
The startling sound of angry rifles.
Drywall could not simply stop
The bullet of a madman’s glock.
Drywall could not soak up tears
Of children in the grip of fears.

When lunatics are hunting sinners,
Children’s lives can hold no meaning.
The game of fear has no real winners;
The teacher draws fire with her screaming.

Grace

This is the boon of time;
It creates a distance in the mind,
A space of grace
And possibility:
That you may not be a slave
To the past,
That your pain is not obliged to last
But fade by grades,
And the tell-tale tears
Vanish in the years.

Akai

The light of the stars above the city
first sparked over a Scandinavian village
in the long forgotten past.

Now, the light has reached
the dilapidated old building,
set aside for the impoverished,
the long forgotten, and the rats.

There, in the darkness of a stairwell,
a shot rang out.
The monstrous Grendel tumbled, dead.
No doubt some mythic greatness
would await the heroic officer.

Only it was an accident without a monster.
And the officer was a villager,
like so many of us, so many of us.

In the days that followed, the elevator
would see repair
so the stairwell could be avoided
until the lights, too, could be replaced.

World of Law

We set up laws
to obey the king upon the throne
and to turn the country into home,
a place where people would greet
each other passing on the street,
not kill each other over scraps of meat.

But laws did not suffice.
For such is mankind’s vice:
we ignore the law, respect the price
of the devilish things that do entice
our monstrous greed to play at dice
with children’s lives
and ancient forest woodland,
the ocean tides,
the dying crops on the drying land.

Laws would not have slowed the fire
that every soul does char and burn
if the king had not in turn
revealed in tales a land of fire
reserved for murderers, thieves and liars.

Hell is the ultimate prison, ultimate end,
the king would say,
and death is here eagerly willing to send
the disobedient to torments vile and eternal,
to die endlessly in suffering infernal.

Still the threat of hell has failed to stop
those greedy few who laugh and mock
the hellish stories as children’s stock,
those bloated beasts with hearts of rock,
who chew upon the people’s bones
and sit atop the world’s gold thrones.

Ice Cream

Does anyone see the irony?

Does anyone think it queer?

Does anyone grasp

That the thing we crave

Is the very thing we fear? 

We eat our slice of cake

And cut a piece to save.

But the light of all those

Birthday candles

Shows where lies the grave.  

We lick our mound of ice cream.

We lick until it melts.

With every lick we may get sick

But oh! how good that felt! 

So chase your little treasures

Until you're out of breath.

Take care that your last pleasure

Is not the kiss of death.

 

 

Destination

The tall volcano will spew its fire.
In rage the storm will roar and break.
The sunlit hills will tremble and shake.

Mankind, another scourge that roams,
Lays waste across the trembling world -
Oceans and forests wither and groan.

Whether the world will end in fire,
Whether the world will end in ice,
Whether mankind's base desires
Will poison the world in passion's guise -

Destruction is the destination.

Those who extol predestination,
In the grip of ancient fears,
Differ little from the explanations,
Offered by the wise of many years
Who trace the arc of nature's dawn
And its ultimate decline
In complex formulas that shine -
The magic spells of a darker time.

Encounter

We are alien to one another:
Our visage,
Our turns of phrase,
Our customs and flourishes,
Our dishes,
Our mien,
Alien is our being. 

The alien brings the fear -
And wonder;
Fear that screams and wonder quiet,
Fear that seems to trail our footsteps
And thicken the evening air,
Wonder drives our fingers outward
To touch each other's hair.

In fear our eyes avert and dart, alert.
In wonder our lips curl - a grin or smirk.

Wandering, walking in the starlight, I think
If we could touch each other's faces
We could build the safest places,
Our strife and turmoil soon to sink
In the knowing that forms our link.

Torn Veils

Winter takes the warmth from everything.
And the lush veils that hide
The eternal mysteries
Wither and fall.

The dark, jagged shape of the trees:
The monsters that walked before history.
The winter sky gray and wan:
The smoldering glow at time's dawn.

The people of the city, puppets of the stars:
Indifferent as the winds of Mars.
The people of the farm, keepers of the faith:
The lonely miles of outer space.

All the souls surrounding me await,
Like nurturing vultures,
My untimely death;
Every boon, every kind gesture,
A gentle prod on the plank at the chasm.
Your trouble does not concern us,
They imply, sly fangs dripping:
Not your aches, cares,
Fears or nightmares.

In the dream I am falling, hurling
Down the chasm filled with millions
Of falling souls, all wrapped
In a mantle of cold, and the voices
Whispering, shouting, calling:
Choices prisons make;
Memories shimmer and break;
Long days of brief sleep-
Fitful, ungrateful -
Your fury is silent and deep.

The eternal mysteries knocked and hissed:
As you failed to forgive, all those chances you missed;

As long as the days are the lines on that list,

Down the chasm of time as you tumble,

With the weight of the sadness you stumble,

As you fumble to shoulder the rock of regret –

The sentence of days that you cannot forget.

Noon

He died alone

In a faraway land,

Left to lie

In an unmarked grave

In the slowly sifting sand.

He'd left his home

In a faraway land,

His spirits high

On voyage to save

The poor in an alien land.

But the aliens cried

When they saw his gifts;

A savage rage of waiving fists -

In a hail of stones he died.

His gifts were books

The villagers feared

For their dark foreboding looks,

Locked in a box

And piled with rocks

On a dune the sun would sear. 

No avian eye, no scratching claw

Could see what the villagers saw:

The myth of civilization

Belied in a book of war,

The tale of a god's creation

Destroyed in a jealous roar,

And the senseless doom of saviors

Whose lessons we all ignore.

 

 

Location

Silly black man!
Did you think
That you could smoke that blunt,
Bluntly blowing your pain away,
On a corner of that stricken,
Despair-ridden ghetto?

Hell, no!
Calamitous location
Is your situation.

Look here, black man.
Take your smoking on down
To the university town.
Will that professor's frown
Force the smokers
(Young and white) to lay low?

Hell, no!
Your situation
Is a pox on your location.

Listen here, black man.
That smoking is just fine
In places where the sun don't shine.
Deep inside the gated homes
(Old and white) smoke roams
From room to room;
And no police anytime soon.

Our location is Us.
Your location is Them.
Look for those white gates
And watch the rates
Of arrest disappear -
But never the fear
Of them;
No, never the fear
Of them.

To Adversity

In the face of outrage,
Facing the brink,
It takes great courage
Not to drink.

Knock

I don’t sleep well, torments at night –
The soft kind.

(small noises, moving, rustling)

What can might,
What could should.

Without sight,
grasping, touching in the dream closet:
dream silent children playing in dream coats –
or smothering?

(small noises, scratching, muffling)

In sleepdark,
always misplaced, the keys I cannot find.
The hooded man ate all the light switches,
electric smiling, switching back and forth:
now lamplight through my window pane,
now sleepdark.

(small noises, tapping, tapping)

In the hallway stands the hooded man
waiting for the knock on the door.
Am I coming home?