Antares Rising
Lying in my childhood bed,
I stared outward
through avid eyes
as the Pleaides swarmed over the gutters
of the neighbors’ roof
like sparrows sparkling blue,
or as the moon inched up my window,
its tentative yellow transmuting to
an arrogant eye-dazzling white,
or as blood-red Antares in its scorpion’s heart
beamed bountiful beckoning
to my adoring eyes.
My only friends,
they seemed
enough.
License
After the taboo term “Palestine”
uttered itself from the tip of my poetic pen,
the governor’s police read me my riots act
for semi-terrorist verse not kosher but traif,
and stripped me of my poetic license
for three months and four Hail Mary Olivers.
My unuttered verse constipated my throat,
twisted my sleepless dreams.
Images, rhythms and metaphors
rotted unwritten,
unread,
unsaid,
as my cheeks inflamed,
my eyes glowed crimson
my lips salivated,
with unuttered alliterations,
until I ran through the streets of Seattle
screaming iambs and rhyming verse of contorted pain
and the Poetry Police shot me dead
for writing without a license.
Future?
crowds
cops
tear gas
billy clubs
persuasion
billy clubs
flight
fight
walkouts
sitdowns
seizures
silence
meetings
convention
power
confusion
conversations
re-formation
the beauty
or the beast?
