No fear as you Push me out Onto the dark ocean Of my death. My old boat May be small, But the dish of moon Will be my lighthouse. Before I drift Out of sight Past your forgiveness And forgetting, Take this hammer And yank the planks From the dock Of your heart.
Follow the HURRICANE EVACUATION ROUTE north away from the Gulf Coast to Fort Worth past new subdivisions metastasizing beyond Houston on freshly-bulldozed earth carved out of the woodlands with beautiful new floorplans from the low 100s past the giant statue of Sam Houston forever standing guard beside the interstate past the Texas Prison Museum in
What book do I pull from the shelf in this hour marking my friend’s return to that light-drenched inkling before everything collapses ? Which title, which weight shall I covet? What do we hold if not each other? Being no one, I cannot say. The earth keeps spinning even as I walk to the mailbox,
If all our voices were to meet in the atmosphere what could the rain achieve? When we give nothing we have nothing. Is it enough to listen? Wisps and heaps, ripples and sheets. Accumulated, dispersed, fingers unknotting death’s grip, steps taken around the flames, in caution, in delight, imagining the greatest undoings.
jazz uptown jazz in the lou jazz in the Big Easy jazz in Bayou City Monk and Mingus and Basie Roach and Tatum and Goodman Ellington and Armstrong and Blakey jazz beyond the sax jazz beyond the keyboard jazz words and rhymes and syntax vowels and consonants and spaces found on the leaves of literary
I come unarmored, my eyes making love to Oklahoma stars that somehow have slipped into the Texas sky. Crossing the Red beneath an early morning moon I chase a gypsy shadow. It matters not to that moon nor the ornamental stars around it why I must ride to Texas. But she wears my name tattooed
