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Dalia |
To Dan Quayle, Oscar De La Hoya, Alice Cooper, George Romero, Rosa Parks, Charles Lindbergh, Clyde Tombaugh, and this guy.
Labels: Dalia
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Dalia |
The time-honored blockade is ritually de-wired.
The bullets don’t care, the suits don’t care,
the governments don’t care, the viruses don’t care
And they are it and we are it and this is it and that is that.
Not much unlike the Georgians,
they had not reached a talking point.
They threw clay jugs through glass ceilings
that protruded from the alleyway
Their senseless arts were like mad libels,
monkeying around while carrying a blowtorch.
They were not anesthetized,
Though there was something quite trodden
About the miniscule reason vanquished by their ancestors
They didn’t quite hammer out
that which was in store
but what they did know they could not see
for fierce winds blew down the alleyway
They jutted out face-first
Before lending themselves a spare moment to do as they pleased
It didn’t matter what they came for,
It was just the audience
for whom they paraded their nothings and their scorecards
And here we still are, suggesting that we might stop them.
And here we still are, donkeys pulling wheels.
Labels: Dalia
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Dalia |
This sweet Hippocrene pouring forth atop Mount Helicon
reduces and sharpens,
agrees us in this hollow trough.
We speak closer on this plane that meets us,
unifying irony, anguish, delights, and unspoken, purple-mouthed truth.
Following smiles will be knowing;
Here we are in the tubes worth knowing;
Beneath the salted snow in the vast empire,
Gatherings of milk-skins are set before the tables.
If it doesn’t strike us, it soon will,
And we are petering, teetering forward
Unto the great white depth
Ever before, with great spidered ironies
Like a rock-solid mold we want to run like the cheetah;
We once withheld this plot,
But now, now straightforward,
The never-ending piecemeal,
We can feel free to go unchallenged,
Marked smarted by those who know.
We find dilapidated mineshafts
And squeeze tunnels through where they wouldn’t be meant to meander;
______
Now I have this, which seemed to want to follow the above:
We’ve got cherries and bunting,
Bunt cake for the ride;
I haven’t made certain what the time will be,
But we can feel electricity shock through us
Like electric needles piercing our veins
We elapse forward and scurry back.
Nine times out of ten
We have a candle illuminating it for us
Yet we lag behind,
Adventuring ever forward as though we knew naught.
I don’t know how to hurry out of here,
But if there was a pleasant theme tune I would hum it;
As we carry on
Baskets and scenery
Heralds and clauses
Fairly missing in the sadscape
Hurtling before us like a rocket disaster
Deadbolt nine millimeter
We call it the coming and going,
The talking from east and west,
The nonchalant city brights
Ashen to our call;
It started with him and we have this world
We can’t come to a conclusion
We shall come to it at another time.
______
Does it work? Or better to re-arrange the first part with "Seventeen galaxies ago there was a meteor-strike?" Or...? Suggestions/re-arrangements/re-mixes encouraged.
Labels: Dalia
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Dalia |
Maybe he opened his own tombstone
but then you were not born to think freely
Always elusive among the verdure
where waterfalls cough and nightingales quake
If he opened his tombstone to me and I wore his brown-stained shroud,
it doesn’t mean he invited me in to walk his way.
And how did you know and who told you
that, I love him
What choice did he have, signaling trumpets and chariots and war?
Only my own image is spooned upside down
He did not fear the consequences,
his distorted image self-loved in the water
He never lost a partner in the shoals,
never waded through vomit and feces,
scurrying like a rat through gutter trash
Who had the power to reign over all this
at the mention of hunger pains?
Maggots and urine can trump all this.
Humiliation and sacrifice are like a rushing river,
like a seafloor beneath crashing waves.
Maybe he cried alone, maybe he carved his future out in dough,
but he did not touch a warm blanket in a field of daffodils
and he did not meet his mistress behind the cabaret
or drink tea with Mamluks or lose his savings at cards
or wake up to discover last night’s bad idea.
I hold these leaves to be self-evident,
turning to dispel the new day (we are not the once-more remembered thought).
Labels: Dalia
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Dalia |
of you and you and them,
cast into genres,
sifting through chaos and muck
for a rare few within arbitrary pockets of safety.
I will know you when I know what your fight-or-flight looks like.
I can’t bend enough to show them what I mean,
but sometimes there are eyes that don’t flicker
and then I am bound.
I can’t always stifle my potential,
and so I hurtle forward.
I am so free, I can do what I want.
This is the filtered product of all the if they hadn’ts.
Why only appears retrospectively,
and only how can be traced.
This launching point is the mustard seed.
Seeds yielding moments before initiation.
I can’t forget how true this is.
My mind steals empty inkwells,
And empties out the ocean.
I produce another crucible to convince you of the legend.
Arguably this field has had all in store since Horus.
I found tautology beyond these words snaking.
We haven’t even spoken of a thousand words.
I can’t remember another time we smelt so smooth and chaste.
I can’t come now because of where we’ve been.
Sites to breathe and tell are all we are winged to flee.
Labels: Dalia
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Dalia |
If you could be ever-loving backward,
The story would have just begun:
We cozied on ship to a land far away.
We encountered sea-grudges and serpents and kindled paths unspoken.
Little were the wells that quelled that ocean.
This odyssey is well-known,
And we can only revisit it unique.
Levered markers dipped into the cast,
Forming a colossus of wind-speared servitude.
We sliced up meat for this, and fed it to the dogs.
We couldn’t be nixed like a candle,
So we just hurried forth,
More stranded by the river than phased by the quake.
It didn’t stand to deliver,
So we eddied forth.
We were continuous
For the love we never got to try
We couldn’t close our eyes
We couldn’t fail to notice what was beached there before us
We couldn’t help but hold what is remarkable
So we alighted onto the shore
Donning our pirate’s garb, pocketing the keys to the hold
And clambered down into the great white depth
Raking and wading and plashing forward
So we came closer and of course we found treasure
But it’s not anything you would think
It’s not lace or snakeskins or coffers or coats
It’s just, you know, with a shrug
I won’t try to remember what happened, but what remains is here,
sandy and straightforward
We stand humbled, rectified,
With eyes like prisms
But we could not stand still once more
Until we hoisted away
Carried off our knowledge
Transferred our abilities
To the hope’s once more important tribute
Gingerly treading along,
In toto we sallied out.
These directions will find us where we were last time,
Energizing to the habit,
And not really spending the lot of one’s career
Ever wondering what might happen without such waste
The exams and future had no effect on me
We met the Kraken, we met the maven,
We met the fairy and the pharaoh
I played my fancies on the Aeolian harp.
We bring them back caulked in bottles
But it’s all a maelstrom still,
waiting to be told.
Labels: Dalia
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Dalia |
Not the cost of bread,
But if you’re killed in a rockslide,
If you’ll be dug out of the rubble?
(A man with no legs got onto the metro,
He was not begging for money because he was selling something.
I didn’t give him anything,
And he said “Miss,” and I made way for him to pass.
And then I objectified him here,
Dragging himself along the floor,
His right arm bound like my right arm.
So now he’s an artifact,
‘Cause legless men look good in poems,
And so maybe after reading this,
You’ll give him a pound for his trouble)
Measured out with railcards,
With the taking of coffee and tea,
With the intake from the waterpipe
And the exhalation of silent, timestricken maladies,
I have tried to answer “why,”
I have and halve,
Until I’m left with the vestiges of an assumption.
Labels: Dalia
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Dalia |
milestones will be crossed
the foundations of the settlement will crumble
beneath fields of broken controversy
The empty melded mineshaft
will oversee
that mountains and fields and the World’s Longest River
belong to everybody, everybody
and the capstones will cease their monolithic fortitude
bringing back acres of finesse
consuming the walls drastic,
effervescent in all further doings
while the filthy pit of mire and misery,
the world and the earth segregated by
all that is made
inching toward a greater disaster
sleeping through chaos
and waking to the alarm of hazard-induced immediacy
chambers and shells, clusters of hidings and burned and beaten bearings
come out, come out
and see what they have done
deny and wait
and leave and ignore
but never will there not be hope
for hope
Labels: Dalia
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Dalia |
He was not incarcerated, but he said:
“Our neighbors they are barbarians
Walls loom high, and the administration hums.
I hold a warm gun,
I zip my pants,
I don’t eat with them,
because the walls make me.
I sleep at night
because the walls let me.
The walls force my stupidity,
and the walls force my intelligence,
and consequently I am punished.
I will either pledge allegiance
And strive for a double standard self-defeating contradiction
Or I will transcend, transcend
And die breathing the truth.
One is a penalty and one is a penalty.”
I sang through bars to the man,
Because it was all I knew how to do from the day I was born:
We will miss these vessels,
Young soldiers carried out to the frontier,
Young and exciting.
They sprout like chloroplasts
In this dirt farm.
We are not privy to their noises.
Excuses are jarred up like grains in the cellar;
We can’t contain them.
The incident has nothing to do with that;
Don’t solve it,
Don’t use it in your story.
We are not trained in metalworks,
We don’t follow a drumbeat so casual,
Like a stark, holiday-marked message,
On the board is where we come from;
Delighted as pineapples
We both think we are hard and we are both soft when we perish.
Dance in the running away parade,
Hold still and quake,
There is a reason for these park mountains,
These scapegoats don’t feel pleasure.
He summoned his mate, who showed me his scars,
Snaking deep obliteration up his arm,
like the branding of a war tattoo,
and his voice rustled:
We are these beams and cement blocks,
We are the doors and walls and scaffolding,
We are the uniforms, we are the ground-up.
We take up whips with spikes,
We take up chains and bars,
We take money, we take recognition.
We are not the brains behind the operation,
We are not the willing or the dissenting,
We are not ourselves.
We are the provoked and manipulated,
We are the moulded and the misinformed,
We are the structure of the device.
We take plea bargains out of context,
We put our names on the work of others,
We extend our shame to the counter of the bar.
Labels: Dalia
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Dalia |
Every enclave, super-rich.
There is dynamite in fertile soil.
Mighty monsters bite their nails,
fumigating lights from their credits.
Minstrels chiming bite their hunger,
consuming their last debris.
All navigating veins
of city-spells and country-vines.
Hollyhocks and gullies of fern
Trapeze before flashing lights.
Middled-out melon rinds
disperse in plastic flames.
Rats flit and flicker
past carousel shambles.
Marble steps lead to ceiling paintings,
when market prices are each to each.
At street crossings,
magnolias and firewood are here and to come.
Labels: Dalia
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Dalia |
Wind soars around high buildings, screaming,
kicking up dust particles into eyes.
Walls smell of years of cigarette smoke.
A President’s portrait hangs over the heads of a populace.
Cabinets groan from swelling.
They splinter,
Exploding with an aged archive,
Their knots like bunions split,
and they kick up the dust of today.
Dank concrete retains its urine smell;
Echoes of voices are thrown around cold corners.
II.
Why should she find counsel here?
It is not our job to do any of that.
We haven’t turned around.
Maybe someone can take her as a pity case.
She is okay with any avenue.
We can also talk about her in the third person.
Shuffle her over to us.
We will decide what to do.
I can arrange for her to see them after I first prioritize the ones behind her and then if they are willing she can wait and then I will come back if she is still here and then they can plan to meet and then contact me and she can go and I will wait and then return before
She can have the chance to decide
III.
The bare angry sun melts wounds,
blurring the wounds of a cramped crowd.
Turnstiles and metal detectors filter the wicked.
Concrete stairs connect the labyrinth of an administration.
Moldy splinters pierce the essence of a bureaucracy.
Damp bills circulate
into the hands of uniformed turnstile and metal detector chaff.
Labels: Dalia
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