|
THE POLITICS OF TRIBES
As
if it were
A decision
Made by circumstance
Or the politics of tribes
Loneliness, one of our disguises
The simple suspension
The last time you will care
What anyone thinks
Of you
Or me
Thinking of you now
I stay within the limits
Of the heart’s balance
On the apex of status quo
The driver isn’t safer while driving
Just as the heart
Is not safe
When it is
In love
MISCELLANEOUS VOWELS
The low night
One of light’s disguises
An algebra of angles
And late afternoon
We use silence
To define what we cannot say
Ample verbs
Fill an arrangement of phrases
Attractive buds in a vase
Lipsticks of spring pushing optimism
Blotted kisses of miscellaneous vowels
Thrown into a land without sidewalks
Long grasses line up
Apparent multiples
We seek to impress the evening sky
With our desire
Leave the road empty
Pockets turned out
Refusing to fill them with just any skin
It seems strange now
To fall flat against the hand
Once loved as a simple pastime
Adored for its lack of demand
RANDOM BULLETS
This is the language of the body
The ankles that retain yesterday
A romance language, an escort to guard
Our sleep in the war zone
To assist the body in remembering
That language is stolen from
Random bullets
A man calls out for his baby mama, his woman, his
whore
You seek the body’s language of forgiveness
Give your lungs a smokeless day
Let your breath reach the bottom of your scarred heart
You would not like to be reminded
Of how much you owe the phrases that kept you safe
You would like to decline the verbs
That push away from your chest
To forget that breathing is part of speaking
Not just drawing shallow breath that leaves
Forty-five percent of the sky around you
Untouched
The body wears this grammar
Like a coat of armor
Self selected from a not-so random vocabulary of grit
Makes limited contact with nouns
Such as loyalty and cigarettes
It is the body that will break our backs
After half a century
With what we were afraid to say
What we never said
What we didn’t want to hear
A WILDFLOWER CORNER
They say your eyes
Reflect open horizon
And ocean thought
Or the strength of tides
Lost among dendrites
Motivates noon
And carries thunder
As pressed laundry
Between pendulum wings
The newspaper becomes unbearable
Creates obligation
And shoving between mountains
Exhausted, the sky lays down night
Covers the mortal wounds of geodes
Turquoise veined with coral oxblood
Sun warmed stones hold our dreams
Messages to the lower order
Held in escrow
Compressed anguish
Faults of childhood afternoons
Honey laden temptation
Below the cranial lava flow
Noon holds the sleep
Of ten years
Waking results in an unending free fall
Self selected from a limited menu
Of articulate questions
Enough spiny oyster and obsidian
To cover a suburban nation
The heart’s geologist
On driveways resurfaced in glittering darkness
Asphalt is given the molecules
Of moving land
In social occasions
Paneled with glass
Urban youth are silent
Water conceals the world as a loud place
Filled with the communion of birds
Companionship of children
A wildflower corner
Where once we were afraid
Of night's dark blue lapis
More of Vicki's work may be found in Best American Poetry 2005, on Poetz
2002 and selections
from her CD, "Urban
Voodoo". Vicki performs her work around the United
States. |