The End
I should have been receiving
food stamps
from Mars that's what she had
written
on her:"Let's fly to the
moon" itinerary
that included places in the
Bronx no white
woman would dare to go:"The
Bronx Zoo
holds animals that don't
exist. Seeing them
makes you go blind. You are allowing
your children to become
agents of an
infernal being. This
conversation is being
monitored by an unfriendly
God."
She said things like that
with a straight face
as we looked at African
Beasts she claimed
came from two thousand years
ago:
"They were reptiles when I
took you
to the Natural History
Museum. We could
go back there and learn about
the past.
They flew beings that had no
wings then,
they still do but no one will
admit it."
They sure as hell flew things
through her mind.
I woke up in a strange dream
of New York City
in which there were street
things neither man
nor beast would admit to knowing crawling
on my skin, she would say, "I had acquired
a disease in the Bronx."
"What kind of a disease?" I
would ask,
" A New York disease, New
York is a
special place. The God we recognize as divine,
died here. I have proof. The Bible tells us
there is another finer world. Our skin diseases
no longer exist there." She was singing another
life story through my lips and all I could
feel was the end, a strange place that would
look like a Subway Station in Upper Manhattan
but would be somewhere else
that felt
like Manhattan in another
life.
The Woman Who Came from
Nowhere
They only poems she believed
in
came from a white giant’s
thigh,
trailed sea weeds like the
green
hair of drowned women,
mirror
images of the self anyone
could
witness as she did, though
glass
bottomed boats scratched and
marred
by coral wreathes that held
the scriptures
she read the holy words from,
reciting
them in cadence the way nuns
did
in cloisters at the end of a
diseased
mind. All the stories she wrote
down
bore that taints of dried
blood, self-
inflicted wounds sealed by an
open flame
from hearth fires in a
strange, afflicted
place she referred to as
“where she was born.”
Annotated maps showed
portals, called
stops, describing the way from one place
of an evolving plain of
existence she
traveled on, the links of
which were
a colored lined grid for easy
reading
underground where the
artificial light
she read with was muted like
the trumpets
of the
fallen-from-grace-angels she
claimed were her consorts
though no one
could see who she meant.
Where she was now could be
described
as, lost in transition, or so
she would say
when asked to explain what
she scribbled
in between lines of the large
print books
in a dead language of her own
invention;
said it was a place like
nowhere,
only closer to
home.
Alien
Thoughts
They say the body I came with
doesn't fit me anymore.
How can that be?
Nothing has changed since the
hour
of my birth-19-it says on
the calendar of my life.
The big hand and the little
hand
are pointing toward the place
of no return just over the
sunset
where the darkest places are.
When I arrive, someone will
teach me how to smoke and
all ten of my fingers will be
blessed with fire.
The voice inside my throat
will be happy then and will
stop eating both the house
and
the home we have been living
in.
Maybe then my body will
remember
who I am and come back to me
so we can get together and be
who we really are together,
not this person wearing these
clothes, pretending to be me
in the mirror,
behind the safety glass
where all the real secrets
are stored.
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