The laptop heats my thighs
as I pursue your imprint.
Google throws up 16,300,000 results in 0.12 seconds.
Facebook delivers a hoard of possible yous.

You are an elusive ghost
in a city of doppelgangers,
always just disappearing
around the corner.

Each click is like
a tap on the shoulder in a crowded street:
the face revealed is never yours.  But there
you go again, breezing past
in the opposite direction.

I am Breathless: I am
The Man Who Loved Women.

I give up: the Diana Wright who is a **** star
is not you, but is quite distracting.
And I can't type poetry with one hand.

I sold my soul to a traveling caravan
And there my heart did play.

Sitting in a harp
Waiting for a trap
To make love fall its way.

Love is a word
Which sparks these hurts
From this fallen day.

I wish
I had something
To make love fall this way

Love is sticky, for we all know it true
Some days you just have to sit back,
And wait for love to find you.

The dawn of a journey; the slate, as yet, blank.
A charm of the breeze attached at the flank.
A cathartic virtue posed as an outcast
For your ship and your crew, dead hand of the past.

Once veiled by the mist and engulfed by ice,
The albatross kiss framed your quarters at night.
Sound luck unheard cleared a space on your shelf;
You killed the poor bird and held it yourself

Its merit unlaced and outrage profuse,
Obliged as a vigil, so strung as a noose
To remiss of a sin you couldn’t undo.
Sometimes a captain’s remiss of his crew.

The struggle of hope in alms of despair
Caught in your throat as you finish your prayer.
Once woven together, as roots with the earth,
Now tortured by weather, the fruits of a curse

The mast downed by lightning, the sky’s bitter wrath;
The swirling foundations of an arrogant past.
And though your veins pulsed as the crew flew about,
Your body was choked by the legs that gave out

Who knows if a curse was the cause of your death?
Perhaps all you stole was a free bird’s last breath.
The ocean, denied all its depths, would agree
A mariner in plight is a dead man at sea.

A piece of rock that had lived alone by the sea
laid lazily on the sands and said sighfully,
"I have seen the waves come and go repeatingly,
and i have touched the sands and felt the breeze.
For thirty years i have seen through life's miseries
Everything's a routine, and is as boring as can be."

An echo then came from the vast ocean and replied,
"You have never touched the clouds in the sky;
into the deepest abyss, you have never dived;
you have not met other rocks on the opposite side.
As the waves wash you out, you'll start to find
There's a jewel in your heart, and you shouldn't deny."

In the hanging kitchen, the smell-
cut cayenned sausage, ejective tomato slices
the whole thing in the back of the throat, inflamed.
Olive oil. Vinegar. Billie talks about her "girl
friend." She lives in Mayfair. (Almost pretty;
don't look too long.)

At times I feel sick.

American man he
strikes the figure of a half-God
broad-shouldered, burned
he does Not exist, John Henry
split his bust long ago and we
are huddled small boys imperfect
in the dust of his legacy.

Our fathers stood from dinner tables kissed
wives were kissed by children one last sip of old
wines and walked into the night looking
for burned-up lamps, the memories of mountains.
Ate stone. Drank mist.
(A thirst for adventure is close to your heart.)
Fell into the grit, the failure, fell
into everything.
(Little else has taste once the spice of life is on your tongue.)

I have nothing but my understanding.
I want to be swaddled, paralytically blind, shamelessly loved.
Or to go out in the wicker
world, there to find whatever our best
died looking for, tigers or ruins or
a life after adventure.

Dog days fly dust to dust over a hick
pit sardined between corona bikinis that house
the unmistakable stench of lukewarm apple
sauce in the c-cup padding and toothless
******* sitting indian style. Graveled friction
fading the back pockets of their overall
dungarees. Amongst them a settler on their native
turf accepting a Jim Beam peace pipe while above
the influence commercials march in protest claiming fried
egg consequences from engaging in the act. The culture
shock is worth the weekly once-in-a-lifetime chance
to sip the tabasco-glazed opening of my chemistry
teacher’s flask while he schools me in perfecting
the cotton eyed joe. A muffler spontaneously
combusts, melting the raybans off the face of a tragically
hip spectator taunted with “that’s why dad named you Joe Dirt.”

Shoot the stars and shoot the moon,
shoot everyone and everything you knew!
Im gun crazy..

Aim for the heart and aim for the head,
aim where ever it needs lead!
Im gun crazy..

No one is left to be or nothing to see,
shot everything in sight but it seemed it was meant to be..
Im gun crazy...

Sharpeville, 21 March 1960
"The native mentality does not allow them
to gather for a peaceful demonstration.
For them to gather means violence."
- Lieutenant Colonel Pienaar

1.
We went with wrists ready
For metal shackles
To clench
Their cold grip
Onto fire hot skin
Boiling with white rage;
The appropriate rage.

This situation has justification
In the predications they hold true
Where to some
Human is synonymous with
******* nature,
Dangerous and hungry for
Light white blood we
Must be caged
To prevent the massacre
We could create.


2.
A child’s body is not a hurdle.
But when fleeing,
Feet pounding on dirt paths,
Black with dark blood, leaking
From shafts of taunting revolvers
And throats of the permanently
Silenced,
What do you do but run?

5,000 bodies bound together,
Melding flesh with flesh,
Fusing unhinged bones to bones
Still cradled in their skin,
Line the street where
Puddles are forming next to
Concaved skulls emptied
By misinformed bullets.

Last thoughts and worries
Are forever splattered on faces,
Tracing red lines
On skin
Sooty black,
As dark as nights will be.

3.
Sixty-nine lay dead.

A rock they said.
When interrogations
Took place
A rock they said.
Empty hands laid
Palm in palm
But a rock they said,

This, they said, sparked
The worry
That made it right for them
To make bullets fall
Onto us like metal raindrops
From an angry heaven
Hungry for black skin
And black blood.

Hands digging into earth
For retaliation,
For blood they said,
But everyone else said,
The rock that flew
Was in hands white as light
As bright as the day was
They say.

If the rocks they said that,
Spurned uniformed egos,
Flew from ground,
To air,
To gunned men like they said,
Does it justify the dead?