Hell-Ragged, But Heartbound

Sojourner of the starlight heart, venture through howl-ragged nightmares to heal those with souls of torn mattresses.

Teach slumlords to behave like hummingbirds.

Return the keys to those locked in prisons of fears.

Wanderer of a million tomorrows, stand on streetcorners, smoke hope boldly, and without a filter.

Crack open expired canned laughter, stew it into something new, serve it up with a fresh smile.

Traveler of shadowy galaxies, rediscover Blake’s heaven in a wildflower, distill its sweet essence,

offer loving doses in the heart’s free clinic.

Counting

There are seven days in a week and seven wonders of the ancient world.

Twelve months in a year and twelve eggs in a dozen.

The word “freedom” appears twenty times in MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Twenty-six letters in the English alphabet, twenty-seven in Spanish.

Saturn has four main ring groups. There are eighteen numbered groups in the periodic table.

The average human possesses ten fingers, ten toes, two eyes, two ears, and one heart.

The human eye can see 7,000,000 colors. Dogs don’t see colors as we do but there are about 900 million of them in the world and over 700 million cats.

Roughly 353,000 babies are born every day, while each day 153,000 humans pass away.

Counting tombstones, counting cars, counting flowers, counting scars.

Count, count, counting the moments when the fog lifts and we’re so alive.

In Our Zoom Room Universe

The sun and moon have gone on hiatus, leaving us with just our floor lamps and ring lights to make ourselves shine.

Virtual drinking parties and reunions have become the tech form of Xanax, while failed wi-fi and cooled-off hotspots can cast us into Dante’s first circle of hell.

In our Zoom room universe, we are boredom-boned and hug-lost; flirtations reduced to pixels on a screen.

Pregnant pauses give birth to quintuplets of abrupt fits and starts of conversations stepping on one another in glitchy lag time.

In our Zoom room universe, we’ve become the ultimate IT experts—

doing our best to solve our inner maladies while also troubleshooting our video chat difficulties.

The River

The river roars, the river whispers.

The river says rather than drown you now, let me sing to you.

The river prays for our evaporating earth. The river prays for our evaporating humanity.

The river doesn’t have a lazy bone in its body. It knows the past is the past; that’s why it keeps flowing forward.

The river sparkles, forever astonished by the sun and moon.

The river’s gaze is so much a reflection of our own. The river sees us. We see the river.

The river says rather than drown you now, let me sing to you.

The river’s bells of dark depths chime for those who’ve lost their way, those who couldn’t find their way back to air.

Modal Mixtures of You and Me

If you sweet talk my swamp blues I’ll get along with your sing-along / If you cuddle with my breakcore I’ll share zygotes with your zydeco / If you don’t deface my drum and bass I won’t go agro on your techno / If you pizzazz my nu-jazz I’ll enhance your acid trance / If you see the stars with my space rock I’ll shinebop your electropop / If you soft-love my hardbop I’ll heat up your cold wave / If you aren’t hostile to my gospel I won’t get crude with your smooth jazz / If you don’t get bossy with my bossa nova I won’t come down hard on your soft rock / If you aren’t mean to my arena rock I won’t diss your disco / If you don’t slam my jam bands I won’t meddle with your hair metal

In the Open Mic of Quarantine

Everyone‘s revelations and agitations get their own microphone.

Check one, check two, go our pandemic and election worries.

Check three, check four, go our elations while celebrating new at-home skills like yoga and cooking.

The MC is the clock, which seems to have lost its bearings, so our agonies and ecstasies get as much stage time as they want.

Our audience is limited to Zoom and social media connections.

The house band in my apartment is always drunk and plays over me whenever I utter my first words into the mic.

Check one, check two…

Up right after me, I hear, there’s a woman that can perfectly juggle the seven wonders of the world.

Lust for Life

That time as a teenager, when I was robbed at gunpoint while working at a gas station.

That other time I was held at gunpoint when I got lost in Harlem.

That car crash, that other car crash, and that other car crash.

That Harley biker dude who nearly punched my lights out.

That time I ripped the IV from my arm and snuck outta the hospital so I could play a gig.

That club in Madison where I ran across the top of the bar, dodging beer bottles and shot glasses.

That San Francisco hallucination. That Amsterdam hallucination.

That park where I take my daughter to ride her scooter and admire the flowers.

How I love to watch her love such a sweet and simple life.

Nowhere, New Mexico

Some gone calendars ago, I was driving through a little town just outside Taos, New Mexico.

It was early winter—the air was cold teeth biting into my flesh.

The setting sun painted the sides of mountains in colors of blood and rust.

Pale clouds drifted by; the sky seemed a lonely bus station for souls coming and going.

Old men sat on rickety porch steps speaking in tongues of mesquite smoke. A woman here, a woman there, like strange fruit in an even stranger land.

A few lean black dogs dozed in the middle of the road. They never budged. Cars, like mine, passing through town had to maneuver carefully around them.

The sun kept falling, the mountains rusting and bleeding.

Above me, souls arriving and departing.

When I Say AmeriKKKa, I’m Not Stuttering

Seems lifetimes we’ve been locked in this basement of humanistic debasement.

Taught that bliss is genetically inferior to the bullet.

As for the children still to be birthed into this world, I refuse to have their umbilical cords connected to the barrel of a gun.

As for those who must leave us too soon, I don’t want them guided to heaven by the hands of a .357.

Still, it’s better to be a revolutionary than to think the world too scary a place to fight for.

No more assassinations of anti-discrimination. No more executions of liberty and justice for all.

Let me cut right through the insane abstractions and troubling silences when I say: the pain, joy, and struggle required to be a wide-awake citizen in these misguided streets of AmeriKKKa—

it’s a 24/7 job.

Human Breath in B-Natural

Breath is music. Human steps are music. Songs sewn from our every thread of existence.

DNA blows blissful sax riffs. Eardrums hum, lively thoughts drum.

Lips bebop, feet hip-hop.

Human touch plays double dutch, makes hearts skip beats.

Breath is music. Human steps are music.

B-natural beauty chimes timeless melodies across the ages. Nectar drawn from human pain creates enduring voices sweet as rain.

Hollers of tolerance break down hate-hewn walls. Drums of kinship, our lifeblood call.

Breath is music. Human steps are music. Songs sewn from our every thread of existence.