Tiger Lilies

Lilium lancifolium

Your showy orange and black flowers
Sporadically occurring
in a variety
of garden escapades

Tiger
Lily

Born upright but so right
In form and purpose.

Tiger
Lily

A beauty in the Wild.

The red blood
on white sand
next to Mediterranean blue

Bullets and rockets in the air
Butterflies on the ground

And all confusion for sound

Death is shadow thin
more so than just a whim

Disco guns , boom boom boom
Fingers pointing at air

so deeply written in despair

You hold your breath
for twenty four hours

You hear the gurgle of death
the stench in air

red blood
on white sand
next to Mediterranean  blue

Sorrow debilitates
No system operates
Well
In duress
An insomniac
Heart attack
I can’t express
Any clearer
Than dearest ones
Dying inside
Every day
As you watch their whole world
Inundated with gray
But it’s been that way
Long before
You can remember
For you
Have felt others’
Despair
Since forever
And weathered storms
Tethered
To some sort
Of faith
In a genuine smile
Still crossing your face
When embraced with
Eternity’s
Sole resting place

Burning fuel but not to leave,
boys circled town, came back
to the station where they began.

Gas exhaust drifted like spirits
above asphalt, dissolving in the night.

Girls stayed in the lot,
waiting for men old enough
to buy liquor, their names
claiming the land-
long after other names lay
buried in the ground.

They kept to the faces,
legs folded on hoods,
lip gloss catching the station lights,
bracelets chiming, hair flips rehearsed,
laughing at trucks circling back.
They wanted to be chosen, and I tried
to want that too- tried to be a girl among girls,
waiting for the moment some hand
would tug me out of the circle.

But my eyes kept straying-
across the street,
to the rise that was not just dirt
but a chest under earth,
ribs shifting,
a hum curling into my throat.
Something skeletal in its patience,
as if Baykok himself
were sharpening arrows in the dark,
waiting for breath to break.
Built long before us by Ojibwe,
still honored as sacred ground.

The others smoked, struck sparks,
sequins spilling from careless wrists,
never thinking how easily flame
might travel down, through us,
into what we couldn’t see.
I could hear bones shifting,
a buried drumbeat, the land’s own warning.

Every glance of the mound
pulled me back into silence.
It told me what the others
didn’t want to know-
that all this circling, waiting,
was only the lid of a grave.

The poet cannot talk about what he already knows.
Northrop Frye

light splits the world in seen and unseen
night accelerates some fascination
I contemplate the poverty of words
who is doing the autopsy of freedom or something,
a requiem for a country that torments its name
streets don't smell of winter but of loneliness and oblivion, exhaustion and rage
some have already forgotten the meaning of blood
we like sweating not weeping, cursing not dreaming, finding the stain not the brain of fog
we practice forgetting like the snake charmers

dreams look like second hand stores, like the promise of the apocalypse,  a local version of Munch's scream, like an uninvented wheel or the beginning of the world.
an old lady sells fir wreaths in disbelief
too many drugstores ignore the untethered soul,  
a place of redemption they are, unwittingly

here there are poets, there are beasts, gentle souls and blind alleys,
indifferent smiles and lazy hands
and who can hear/bear the echo of that song... better dead than communists, comrades
province hates the center, the center forgets its north,
the all good sequestred against the all bad, no dialectics in doublespeak
truth to be told, there is  no consent for telling the truth
ersatz emotions exchanged casually, Hell is other people. always.  some play Russian roulette with reality, we are the heirs of a history disorder
if my dreams are full of birds, waters, lonesome deposits of the flow of time, I have to wonder
is history a desire machine searching for some mythical proportions

this country or a ****** mother with indifferent hands
here citizens have no faces, but interrupted gestures, fractured thoughts without containment
I fear those who cannot cry
without the meaning of blood history has no meaning or maybe it does, look at the speed of some digital thoughts,  the attack of ready made ideas. ideology becomes eulogy

no wonder I don't know how to end this poem
we need new words that contain their power
what is freedom? who knows, who cares.
oh, an old adagio, a gangrene of our undiscovered minds

than the autumn leaves
flying off the maple trees
in late September. I
remember when she

was smooth as the
bud on the maple and
round as the kitchen
table. She’s falling faster

than the pouring rain
on my windowpane in
drops of Jupiter. I remember
her juicy and green like a

cucumber.  She's falling faster
than a roller-coaster, with her hands
high up in the air. She once was
a seat, like my chair.