Fairy, evil fairy, yes you did
And the night you brought
Never left the bed.
The hailstones are drilling
Silver bells are ringing
Holly and elves
And cotton-wool snow
And wolves in the whirlpool.
A hurdy-gurdy
Outside the building
Churned in bad weather.
To remind us of Germans
He showed us his belt
And his pipes, no monkey
We threw him money.
It always hurt when you climbed
My rope of hair
To get under the covers.
Working on the inner wall
Just in case someone else entered.
Too hard to break into:
A brick wall, an arsenal, a girl.
A Mr. H strode down the street
At night with his hands behind his back
And once lured
Little wet-panted Betsy into his flat.
She was, he said, his best friend of five.
Green or gray depends on the amount
Of excess given.
How much of the rain on her legs was his.
I remember kissing away the mist
On the windowpane,
A rare whistle into eternity.
*
What an emulation from earth is de—h
Where love has sunk its teeth.
Has ground into the ground and spat a seed.
They say sex once a week
Makes a person as happy as an apple and a doctor
When they meet.
*
Please orange sky divine
over the crossbows and idling cars,
Drench the world in the color of fire
But not its heat.
Terrify the people, burn up their hate.
Boys have died to become men.
What degradation to be thinking
How to O.D.
Technically, infallibly,
To expect an answer to: What am I living for?
Memory of a future no longer aggressive.
A curled fist like a cave
With racists in it.
If I looked inside, the cracks
Exploded into relatives
And a trolley of shadow
headed for us.
We held our cameras back
And looked through our eyes instead.
The longer we live, the weirder it is
That people disappear forever.
Such violent disruption of order!
Angels sometimes arrive
Not knowing what they are.
The wind blows easterly
There is a jar of mums
On a table, and Father Lobo
Calls to say goodbye
On his way to Mumbai.
If he dies on his way.
Six pennies is all I had left
And fear until my cousin
Turned them to gold.
“More faith, more faith!” they jingled.
We laced our lives together
(him here, me there)
with holes to begin with.
You always begin with air.
Decades separated by yards
Of string. Snowy stitches
Criss-crossing spaces
And never touching
Each lost in guessing
Each hovering over a split
Before another needle
Cuts to the quick.
They are tailors by temperament
And ability, unrolling great sheets
Of paper for the streak of a razor
And measuring corners.
Feet made room for the leather
Later and bellies
Shook up a rhythm
To match the rain on glass.
Pins in their teeth to stop them
From laughing, everyone
Lying through their teeth.
Were they I made to be
killers now so strange?
No one is waiting for me
At the end of any day.
Just paper doilies
And Demerara sugar
In a tiny paper bag
For the next party.
On a wet and Bronte day
When sisters lean face down
And hold onto the printing press
The gentleness of their voices
Is the way of poetry:
A turn to silence.
Tweens are halves.
Half-faced
Hooded
By hair and flesh.
They smoke skunk in the park
Then sleep like elves.
Falling through existentialism
Back to religion.
One drove a bus-load of Christians
To practice
Christianity. They had to bring guns,
Ropes and lashes.
They had a box of Chinese
And sticky rice
To spoon up during discussion
Wiped clean the would-be Christians
Headed to the targets
With one shouting instructions.
It was Nasty Nancy the minister
Who could not explain his destiny.
Not just a dream but children
Eating and playing
Soldiers and dolls, crumbs
From yellow toast.
In the grass at Queen’s Park, litter
Goes in black bins
With the bombs, but here
In Little Town,
The future is actively advancing
To the window-glass.
Bang, bang.
_______________________________________
Angels as we know them
Stand in the wings
Like failures
Administering ethereal suffocation
To themselves.
Faithful mainstream
Control the frequency of
Bandwaves, good work
At holding the standard.
Fists on chins working & resting
Energy leaked
Every evening
Into dreams.
No quite enough achieving.
The real failureds
Worked just as hard as others
And were forgotten.
Failures I mean:
Solitary wrecks,
Smarty-pants,
Pontificating over drafts and revisions
Until they ruin the original.
Clover sticks out of bones
No longer violet but brown
Are dung today gone tomorrow
Failures like these are fertile
In terms of tomorrow’s children.
Their work continues after them
Insisting on fruition.
The visionary ones
Could care less
Know more than they can express
So proceed on to the next experiment
Without any sense of Best.
Some creatures here below see
Spots of light as evidence
Of heaven
Everywhere.
Enough they laugh.
They really are like
Ants sense when a crumb is coming
Before the bread is cut.
Some say winners
Is your worst enemy
(in every detail your superior at strategy)
lives well is loved and expects the evenness of heaven.
Success dies
When recognized
*
What is the difference
Between a man who shoots others and then himself
And one who shoots others and runs away?
Between one who is caught and executed
Between one who is locked up for life?
Between one who believes in the justice of God?
Between one who is in despair?
What is the difference between mercy and pity?
Between pity and compassion?
Between mystics and crazies?
Between a bomber with a bomb strapped to himself?
And a boy who rides his skateboard through the traffic?
Who has fear, who has courage,
Whose God is different from the other?
Which one is open to surprise?
Who massacres schoolchildren just for fun?
Teacher, teacher, answer us.