Tritone Life

Bach plays loud above a-rhythmic freeway groans
and jerk and gun shifts of shiny metal hulls,
coffee in paper cups, sleep edged with thought,
bodies within bodies, slaves of slaves.

Pop-rock plays sedation when florescents buzz
and black phones swarm like angry bees
spinning aggression from hive instinct.
The office man yawns, the office girl grins
and pop rock plays a love song
none contend yet all believe.

But Bach plays loud a second world
once heard never again possible to ignore.
When a soul through a medium a hundred years old
breathes a pitch that vibrates the spheres
and builds the release of up looking down,
I see aggression like cars-silent objects moving-
and in the void I find that world
still marked and living.

Pop-rock chastises imagination
and straps with silk, black bands
the erotic pulse to the image bed-
get me home, get me laid,
get me money, I’ll be ok.
Pop-rock sings a sex dirge where
the stifled cubicle births a bored frustration.

But Bach plays loud above a-rhythmic freeway groans
and jerk and gun shifts of shiny metal hulls.
We close our eyes, we frantic speed.
We sensual blind, we dream of dead stopping.
Coffee back in paper cup, thought edged with sleep,
body within body, slave of slave,
I am ready to cut these weights
and fly.

Jazz is the jagged edge,
so give me the beautiful cloth,
not for edges or beauties
but for threads making patterns
whose colors interplay to the cut-off sharp.

Building sweetly is rarely heard,
so give me dissonance that punctures
the dream ahead we make when behind is blind.
Hardly ever we see fully into either,
and beauty is not completely born
yet of frailty something beautiful.

Arguers are never solved,
so give me agreers who disagree,
revelers and punchy diggers
who regard the soft under-belly of pose
as a mother regards her child’s will.
They gently abuse their armor to shreds
and fall tender at the tough tissue of heart.

Few things consist,
so let the contradictions praise the consistent.
The blind man cannot see,
so let him tell of colors hidden in night.
The deaf man cannot hear,
so let him describe the timbre’s subtle change of pain.
The mute man cannot speak,
so let him sign what we do not say.
The dead man cannot live
so let his dry bones moisten
at the rain brought him by the wind.

Jazz is the jagged edge,
so give me the beautiful cloth
because the cloth is whole.
The eyes below do not see as the Head above.
So when the Head is stated,
I never fear the abstractions.
I already know the truth.

And then there was no light.
I fingered worn wood drawers-
their racket open a cringe in ear,
fumbled contents an echo in kitchen-
for a dim protector of sight:
flashlight like modernity’s heirloom.

I stepped out to night of little distinction,
color a nuance, shape a shade.
A point of orange raging then still
shows Ron smoking and his garage, I guess, open.
An inclination of dark against luminescent stucco
must be Madeline’s hair sliding over the baby.

Sound steps in the grass. I jerk to my right.
Moving in pixilated dim, a faint white smear.
You out too? You out too?
I believe we’re neighbors by commonality’s cold comfort.
The white smear leaves.
I’m alone on a dead road.

Back inside children clutch their toys
and wide-eyed guide the beam.
Midwives of the elemental,
they search wavering corners
for ghosts I’ve grown used.

I start on a gurney’s white-starched sheets and lay
how he says and show what he asks and then
his finger through tissue and fat digs
to tension and hurt the pressure of healing.

I end to a world tilted off.
Every sitting now is how do I sit?
Every standing now is how do I stand?
But joints can neither find comfort nor return
where memory loses the force of habit.

I pray to pollutions like bottled little christs:
please dissolve to block the bent structures of body-
faith in alchemy through water and acid.

But pain is not the devil’s servant.
I swallow and yet it scrapes the vision of my proud pleasure.
Pain is the finger of rebuke. Pain is the grip of love.

I started on starched-white sheets
and waited for the healing to come.
The healing came and the pain did not go,
both.

I ended to a world tilted off,
not able anymore to accommodate its slouch.
I stand at a slant, my hip pinches me straight.
I sit at a slump, my leg pains me walk.
I walk head down passing the hidden
in cowering formation of chemical ignoring
while numbness spreads from the crimp in my spine.
His finger is pointing.
I raise my knowledge and pull straight my strength,
stabbed out of groveling
as if all these were merely flesh and bone.

South wind shivers the leaves an anxious relief from summer’s heat,
and the moon fights a thin cover that might,
in another season, be a storm.

Bushes groan laments against the splintered fence,
and grass blades whisper a chatter so quiet
you get closely and do not hear it.

The man wants sleep but wonders: do enemies yet live?
Every liar is a mirror and every friend what I want,
so perhaps I should wonder, do friends yet live?
Is there a language more vague than friends and this wind?

She has traveled with this man
where brown fields are the truth of mid-day heat
and wondered how she truly knows
one who smiles through words so difficult to say.

Do distant oaks stand a line of cool?
Or, like thunderheads over the mountains,
offer relief delivering pressure?

They live life like the gap in the stride of shoe falls,
longing to hear a word so true it is substance,
yearning to blanket love in the rise and fall cave of winds
where close marches the beat of motive.

But the south wind blows through the screen
a channel of breath between two backs in bed.
The anxiety of trees is music for dreaming.

The liar sat at the table drinking his favorite beer.
Calloused, bloated feet scuffed the tile
and the ocean air breezed through the open windows.
He ranted his gravel voice his views
on politics, on prisons, on children.

He stood in the entry as we were going out,
elated and stamped the booming floor,
growled at them, clawed the air a stained hand,
man as animal in jubilant pretend
and the dog barked, shivering.

We took the boys to the beach
so they chased the waves in and out
and screamed happy fear,
a child’s fear of danger that never quite touches.
But of a sudden they were quiet
and sat making signs with driftwood.
We laughed to them the meanings
but their serious faces cast mystery.

Seagulls sounded the kind of cry that pierces a pleasant dream.
The dog snapped at their shadows as they passed across the sand

And what poetry is there to write here?
Achievement lacks the labors of time
and borders the safe guard of hazard:
truly the place where dreams come true.

You slide from scene to scene
and no meaning takes you.
Over large creatures still their faces
and no words greet you.

What can I say?
Not even the irony of unhappy kids
and angry parents is of any value.
Just believe in your heart that you are good
and lo! Dreams come true.

Yet outside the castle lives an animal
more demon than any fairytale.
Off the road where busses pace and
beyond the median of mowed grass
stands a wall of tree and vine yet untouched.
Look and you cannot see.
Enter and you may not know.
But she is there like a myth
in the swampy heart of your careful footfalls:
Perhaps her thick green hide once beautiful skin,
her yellow eyes once blue,
their narrow once innocent.
Do not look and you will see.
Stand too close and then you know
when the hiss and the steam:
It was like this that men once called her Dragon.

How many times the heroic have gone down this road
by the same swamp of flat-tufted green and spiking palm,
under the same grave yard sky where thunderheads cast their menace,
to the same rockets, those beasts of a single rage, rockets.

Hear their eruption and feel you tremble.
How to ride on thundering fear to severe stillness?
There is no mistaking the child’s will in this,
for why have we gone if not wonder?

How many times the heroic have died in the blue beyond,
held up and suffocated in their perch,
pushed up and obliterated in the form of Y.
Victorious pontificate peace on the efforts of the dead,
but is not the hand of God a terrible mischief?

See its motion and feel you humble
like the minds of ancients who first heard them babble.
There’s no mistaking the child’s fear in this,
for why have we gone if not pride?

How many times the heroic have dreamed off this road
where once there was no road at all,
where a man’s leather boot first broached a world
of flat and vulnerable, moist and alien horizon.
He saw no familiar of sharp mountains and dusty plains,
felt no weight of throne and icon comfort.
He spoke to a world whose voice he could not hear,
this slave of the stretched finger rule,
and called it for a possession.

Hear the words and feel you disdain
the proclamations of our former greatness.
There’s no mistaking the fall of the child.
He rises above his father with a steel body and a furnace mind,
sparks from which the stars themselves shine no equal.

It’s easy to see sometimes why they hate us,
looking up from the pit to where our mouths
consume without tasting and our eyes
receive without knowing. We build the world
on the floor of our amusement. We watch
tiny players from too great a distance
to see them move. And the props of their lives
far too removed to arouse concern. Shacks perch
on a parched earth hillside where bruised girl
clings the tough guy who’s a boy. Laced tight canopy
covers bone-skin child more tightly than his shirt,
standing in the mouth of a hut. Drawn old city mother
hocks her daughter, toothless come-on, breasts plunging red-shirt. Cathedral relentless
squanders heaven’s citizens inside a wall of some 800 years.
There live the motionless. There live the numbered.
There they soak up storms and feel
the great cloud of the protected.

Have pity on us, so hard to pity.
Arrogance is not the excess but the defense
of a stomach that expands and is never full.
We try and we try, but no hardship we create
makes the having worthwhile.
Children of divine warning
we are sky high as good as on ground.
Ears hear their satisfaction from emotion’s stick.
Eyes see their possession in the screen thought placed it.
Where ever a man goes there he finds with him
the device of his anesthetism
so no comfort is too evasive, no squalor too great
to draw water from the well of empathy.
And the landscape orbits beneath us.

We are not a country called so by contours of earth.
Day by day and night by night she tells of what she knows,
of lights and signs, of chaos waters and those alien to air,
of valleys fragile enough to break
and mountains strong enough to shake.
This before stars were gas,
continents shifts of pressure and the land a prop for slogans,
when no built psyche her space of three dimension evils could hazard,
when gates opened only imagination could walk through
and longings ached only the prophet could speak to.
Do we feel?
The desert is empty, the prophet is gone.
He long since has spoken what long since has come.
Yet even here it vibrates the ground from where it first shook.

So do not be anxious over what we have,
wealth transcends nothing.
No one’s heart can make him a fortress of paper
or a guard of digits.
We are all the black and the frightened
chased down by the huntsman for curse or for blessing.
And yes, the numbered lie here as well.
Even in the palace of our distraction
where castle dreams sparkle so unnaturally grey
and fear is figures of paper mache
and Jamaica and Aruba are but walking distance
by a pink brick path that follows along
the white sand, the thick grass, the man-made lake.
Even here there are clouds above us. They gather and hang
and the suspended air begins to break.
A man and his son hold hands when they realize
they are walking nowhere in the rain.