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Far from Algiers
An unnamed race slips by
ethnographer and xenophobe,
roiling bowels and
hackles,
electrifying space.
Genomes tell us nothing
about our
overlords;
we know we’re an underclass
to these corsairs and
otherlings.
They break our doors at night,
take our wives and
children,
foul our consensuses with ideas
and scat full-sail on glassy
seas.
Though we take them to our beds
they're unwelcome in our
churches;
they profane our certainties
and stir up gifts
renounced.
South of every guarded circle
is a Barbary where our
rules
stand on their heads and dance
to tunes of turbans and
scimitars.
Their ships fly no flags until
it's far too late and we're
engaged
in the kind of bloodiness every youth
prays for to spite the
social good.
Every simpleminded day
guards against
kidnappers,
every complacency has its dey
fat on ransom in some
Algiers.
If there were no Barbary Coast
to haunt our dreams and
genes
we’d blanch stupid as we want to be
along the usual squalid
stretches.
Near
Rebellion
We’re born to pass through walls
unmuddled by geometries,
to crumple
dimensions in our pockets,
paint imaginings in the air,
born to rip
persuasion
from our faces, to know
our parents speak in fear.
In
which dream do we sleep,
day too staged to trust, or night
where we’ve
seen everything before?
Heaven is as we remember it.
We’re not
strangers anywhere.
We’re lost among derangements,
but wind bears the
scent of home.
Morning is always unfamiliar.
We must relearn each
object’s nap.
Sometimes we can’t remember
the ways in which we’re
bent,
waiting for the image in the mirror
to evaporate, hoping to
return
to an original condition
sparkling restive in our marrow.
In
so many eyes elixir, why
unnatural wont to turn away
and why in the grace
of deja vu
are we in the way of ourselves?
If you tied your shoes
together
you’d get around no worse
than grabbing a cab and
thinking
you’re actually getting somewhere.
I can’t brush off
memory of flight,
the awareness of a puma,
translucence of a
leaf.
I remember huddled atoms
in a Macedonian shield,
near
rebellion in Baybars’ sword,
nothing too exquisite to bear.
Then I
remember to pretend
I’m going to be buried here.
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