Marble Bag - 20160421

Breath-weight of January sixth cars smashing bodies and metal

Rejoinders of angles and vertexes the mathematics of comas and back aches

Red lights and trolls under bridges reaching out and smashing people you love

Alive like guzzled chevon hanging on in the mouth waiting for that slip of sunset

To let go like a rabbit hole that keeps tunneling into a labyrinth

Of what to do now on Thursday nights stacked for Good Fridays

Planned out for this tossed lot of fabric in the process of being stitched

The sewn papyrus of lovers weaving stories of nomadic normality

Of Palestine yoked Lebanese Jesus bumping Brooklyn and New Orleans

Like cell mates to be locked in this circle pit mosaic ridge-stones and fired bricks

Round, walling oneself in to see properties on streets like eye-candy

In the art of the deal, to make this fabric hold time in a net

To quell the fabric of what it means to be amassing decades on a second hand of fingers

That this thumb knows what heartbreak is because of the five sunk in the other palm

But now the knuckle has been pruned like a cat claw, thrown outside and asked

To fend with a stump bleeding poetry and cannabis numb-tongue recollecting

Seduction by an aunt to marijuana at twenty-two while reading the Bible

Fend-off Catholic asceticism to toke into a dragon’s maw

Sit inside and let the saliva germinate what a poet is supposed to be

Breathing

The stoicism-imprint of an older sibling accountant shell forming like a clay soldier

Around limbs and caked torso, burn off the hardening mud

In the blue notes of Miles Davis and the spirit of Coltrane

Humming the flower dance of the Agapanthia pustulifera finding home

On a park bench with Charles Mingus shedding the long horned beetle for a body as a vehicle

Rounding the block twice because nobody told him about the parking spot

That the ride ends here, interjecting room for pardon, for movement

And all there is an engine attempting to fire, yet stilled in this night

To imbibe to consider a waistline, filming numbers of inspiration offered

Of what poetry does for living beings to allow spirit to cast weight from the load

Hauled by these vehicles, to move more freely in the arms of a lover

Like moonstruck mist wafting in the breath of bedrooms

Hearing the sounds of neighbors and the repossession man pounding the walls

Siblings of demand dictating to a pair about identity politics, garbage cans that need taking out, and the trumpeter’s call when the Saints of New Orleans march

The skin rubbed by a thumb in circles of grief wider and narrowing non-symmetrical

The way god shakes the marble bag