Tinderbox

It's a sidewalk symphony/roadside suite.

It's the trash-bag canopies on Eldert St.

It's the blue hum broadcast through a common radio

voices...singing...hard-times...rumors(stories)of creation.

In trusting the impersonal much sacredness is lost.

Most enlist and thus have missed the kiss extracted from the dust.

And I've listened since my patience began

and it glistens in the distance, standing in the footprint

where I found my lover lost.

Though it makes me tremble all these thoughts

that I assemble fall like droplets in an ocean,

waves surging, yet balanced like the tides.

Mine is for the taking, every note that I am shaking

falls like waves all around you.

What colors have you sought from the demons of the world

Segregated rhythms on the Bayou banks, the pearls of injustice

the way the blacksmith pounds the heated rod,

patience, the hammer knows.

Thrice you have rescued me from falling grace;

once when I was a beggar and you were the rain on my face,

once when I was crippled and you carried me,

and once when the blindness of others taught me how to see.

Staring at the green that surrounds my pupils leaving

bulletholes in the glass--the glass I was trained to see

myself in, through two-dimensional bulletholes.

I remember walking from the market to the park,

streetlights flickered and your eyes grew dark.

Paint me a picture darling, I'll put you in it.

In the hands of warlords the concrete turns to prison yards

and the corporate mind is pointing towards the capitalizing

off ignorance, indifference, exploiting our inheritance.

Lightning over the motel in Sioux Falls, South Dakota-

the watchman checks a fuse. With his stoic black hair

and his blue/green eyes--more energy than we know how to use.

Here it doesn't matter how many mirrors you had to

shatter on your way to get here--what colors have you

bought from the demons of the world?

Wider than a river and deeper still,the wounds of cruelty

will heal themselves, I know they will.

Slow changes, and gathering ourselves.