Mexican War Streets

Though by the path I lead

The passing of time and the pouring of tea

Are all I've lately seen

O my soul {SH 159}

Until the temporal bridge be burned

Until our anchor stocks hold firm

Where the hands of clocks don't turn

O my soul

May our lips remain discreet

While your traps are beneath our feet--

But how long before our tails are caught

By our "free" thought?

Sugar in the cane, candles low

Kettle on the flame for the teapot? No

I tremble at the thought

Sugar in the cane, candles low

Southside Flats where the upscale go

I tremble at the thought!

On the Streets of Mexican Wars

I battle with the

Memory of a first fight

In our contemptible youth

I quoted White Nights

"My God, a moment of bliss

Why, isn't that enough for a whole lifetimes?" --F. Dostoevsky

Thinking that'd get rid of you

And waited with a stone in my hand

But you were quite right:

Nature had another plan

(& failed to run it by me)

Nature had another plan

Some other surrogate self

To live in the sediment of so many somebody elses'

Innumerable lives and you were right:

It's not a person who dies

But worlds die inside us --Y. Yevtushenko

Sugar in the cane and the candles are low

On the West End Bridge looking down at the Ohio River

I tremble at the thought of what's often referred to as 'karma.'

The sugar and the candles are gone

You panic like a mouse when the lights go on

(I ADMIT, IT WARMS MY HEART

TO WATCH YOUR WORLD FALL APART)

The colorful hills talked me down from the bridge:

To heck with all the drugs my parents did

I'd like to meet whoever said the words we print in red

With a coin in my teeth on the Mexican War Streets

Rivers of sadness and mutual need

In the loud desperation of social routine

The rock of salvation, lightly esteemed (-Deut. 32:15)

And distance surging like oceans between us

Suspended by strings

Over rotating wheels

Via magnets and springs

Of Carnegie steel

With 'representation' our fashionable theme

And unfathomably powerful forces

Like oceans between us

We have all the signs we need

Do we decide not to read?

"My will: his will that fronts me

Seas between." (-James Joyce)

And those who precede: the relation between

Is listening beside me

At night like some seismic machine

While the metal vibrations of petrified men

Are etched in translation by pendulum pens

And the movements of underground plates

Do nothing to bridge or exacerbate

Oceans between us