Song of the Safe Streets Marchers
(With a nod to Leadbelly)
People, there’s a land that turns blood into water
a lake where the book jumps the frog in the day
a ground where the broom jumps over street sweepers.
There’s a hood going round taking names.
The walkers turn the bullhorn to the electric church
There’s a hood going round taking names.
a bender of doors intermixed in grounds
a redeemer and upsetter of ash and broken beds.
There’s a hood going round taking names.
Thunder and bricks are alchemized in feet
by walkers breaking rock after rocks.
Locust in smoke raise from temples to the sky
as bowls and boils refract.
Souls come from gutters revolving crematoriums
raising swirls between the saved and damned
Debts-in staccato shoe pats- turn to alms.
There’s a hood going round taking names.
Traps will turn. Gun sanctuaries will fall.
Trombones that call roughnecks
in evergreen safe houses
Hit wall after wall after wall.
Witnesses walk through Sucka hills
as marks are washed and made clear.
One hundred million souls in sketchers
call the roll to upturn street plagues
past the pain of understanding (and discount boots).
Past the pain of abetted blood on roots, they move
to make eternal plagues a lie
to make-in their walking-a new tree of life
past blue shadows tinting all windows.
The sky drum majors shout to block gallows.
There’s a hood going round taking names.
There’s a hood going round taking names.
****
The Doctor Who First Prescribed Charlie Parker, Trying To Get To The Underworld
Daniel’s dream songs are not to be remembered.
Temples, muezzins, and wayward cantors
are bereft of promised lands or guardians.
Rituals move hollow without annunciations
in mangers, juke joints, and concert halls.
The man in linens who never blew too loud
he steered to the winding sheets.
The multitudes who lay at his throne and feet?
Their sorrow songs are on his scales.
Let me in so the world and spirits make sense
I cracked the gospels, and Gabriel is gone.
Second comings are masked in bottles and prescriptions.
Staffs and bonds turn synonyms for god
in the fatherless arms of the night gurneys.
Rebirthed dream boys and needle queens
fly in arcs from hills to hospital files.
Galilee is a howling, glittery wilderness
of drunken laughter and atonal throngs.
Let me recuse from the sounds I’ve sinned against
I cracked the gospels, and Gabriel is gone.
What matter of man can break people’s song, lord?
What matter can break planes of spirits and bodies?
What fires will pour through all space and time
if I walk from the rough sides of the mountain?
What will bound all sound and sense
if my bones aren’t the embers of tomorrow?
If my med quota is the lasting price
will songs like his last horns be pawned?
Take this heart–this body and minimums.
I cracked the gospels, and Gabriel is gone.
****
Carolina Slim Making Beads For His Niece After a Jump Rope Robbery
Though in the woodlake, he finds her moonstones.
He will bring her the patterns to keep her home.
He sifts in the saltwater clay agate red,
then passes on and over their fractal skies
reflected in the hidden heart of turquoise
reflected is the pyrite and sphered out silvers
in the smoother’s still threshing floors.
Unbroken is their dollar circle, globe by globe.
Small words become large in the traveling axis
of box jumps remade in kinetic steps.
Arcs of black holes in the new needle’s eye
the afterlife of the patterns she will dictate.
The tumblers are the easel to let her color
a world that crosses before it betrays,
that keeps in coded chants and handclaps
life for her in the light of too distant suns.
Though in the woodlake, he finds her moonstones.
He will bring her the patterns to keep her home.
