What are you doing up so late, little one?
Awake among the Petri dishes
No place for children
Where is your mother? Your father?
Do you mean to tell me
These nice-looking men in lab coats
Are the only parents you know
As your filigree DNA unfolds they peer
Into this sterile womb
Strain to catch a glimpse of
Your nascent primitive streak
Unwilling to admit it is theirs
We all fear
Tell the inhabitants of this broke-down place
new sheriff in town…
who so resembles the
wise child posed
Years ago in a picture
Beneath this ink-blue-night-sky sombrero,
Clark Gable mustache, glint of forever in your eyes
As this endless tide rakes an uneven shore
As words fail to form the adequate cup for sorrow
You go on-
Unstoppable heart.
Boy with the unstoppable
Heart.
So close
to a reclusive keeper
of memories, of wrongs
Shuffling among the forgotten objects
Placeholders for the barely living:
anonymous empty
water bottles, hollow and crumpled
Become the jury
Old newspapers still swaddled in
Their plastic rain protectors
Told to be
Witnesses or spectators
Instructed to rise
As a one-armed nutcracker assumes the bench
Rag doll court reporter records the proceedings
Mr. Vinegar prosecutes while
the defense attorney was appointed from among the
A pantheon of generic
Happy Meal toys.
But the victims are living songbirds
Twittering in the disheveled
cage of my heart of course
Always re-animating dried bones-
Off-kilter, neglected, wrongs
Will inexorably be
Radically, fundamentally transformed
When the true King
Calls them back
To life
in the space of no more than
Half-an-hour
someone steals his little shoes
dear to him/dear to us
Still, just shoes.
At the scene of the crime we
Call their names
Thinking whoever did this has to love them
Must have loved them
Oh. This song I know the words by heart
Sang it all those years ago
With all the other sodden
Unbearable
Break up songs for babies.
somewhere floating in the ether of souls there is
another us
Without the inevitable entrapment of self-preservation
-The pig mom and the human child
I use my truncated vocal apparatus
to try to warn you you are
– not safe here
among the scientists
With their crisp white coats and syllogistic rejoinders
They count pieces of us
Placing animal in one
category
and the human in another
Bone-bone-bone-
Spleen-heart-cornea-
Never question whether we can
see color or
Feel pain
Confined instead to
Diminished souls jarred by
All the words for
monster
She folds the old court room,
kangaroo judge, too-
chatty DA,
disembodied victim’s advocate
Into a single square of
pressed paper
Mama’s voice cracks over the
willful substitution
rendering mandatory sentences into a
Chain of paper doll victims
flattened easily
Into origami anger
….funny hats to
fragile sodden boats
hit by each percussive wave of
Shouldn’t-‘ve-been
Shouldn’t-ever-have-been
Done-to-us folds
after almost exactly 30 years
I return to the original cone of silence
Scooped not by time and chance but the
Actual-true-hand of God
near the plain of Megiddo
where bad, terrible, awful things have, did, and will
Happen.
You have a tell, my dear
In all your smack talk about leprechauns and canine destinations for women
At 2:30 in the morning
the aircraft flies too loud, too close
to my insomnia
I remember your anger is your origami armor
against the wounded you-us-story
sewn into the cloak
of every disguise you put on
in vain.
your birthday falls
between the Ides of February and
pruning day for roses
when the master gardener
makes them sound so alive, so fragile, so human
the way you once were
Boy without words for the monsters
we all become without the Antidote
without the blood transfusion
without the interventionist God
Who somehow, ineluctably abides
this fallen terrible
world where children, babies even
grow up thinking both antichrist and apocalypse are normal
Whole time grown ups
Just shout the most destructive platitudes
into the shotgun corridor of
This unbearable
desolation.
Voice in your head
Kinda sounds like you but…
Kinder, wiser, more forgiving
Bright penny on the ground
In the most unlikely places
A posse of leaves long wrung from living limbs
Dance, alive in the winter wind
Sing your name
No matter
A big impossible
Promise unless it is Truth
Kind that sets a body free
Not unlike those ephemeral leaves
Dry bones
Bits of things found
In the unlikeliest places
Love will find you
No matter what.
They emerged from an ordinary
van
…wore ordinary clothes
shuffled toward me along uneven
lines
squinting, sun-struck
I realized: Magi!
come close enough for
greetings and salutations
along the usual
Lines of dignitaries and princes-
Hands shaken; eyes met
they said oh, it is you!
(Me?) their honored guest?
regretting I had no
Gold, frankincense, myrrh to give them
Come so far we all are
children of the King.
Carrying Light 