TURAL BODIES by Brent Vickers
Vacillating peers bustle
Through the streets
Of nameless cities,
Meeting and greeting
And smiling
Through shaken hands.
Though every extended pore
Seems to breathe out
Slightly,
They remain forever
Breathless in a vacuum
Of sour patchwork overcoats
And intelligible tightrope rogues.
I watched
As the greatest men
Spewed bile and concrete statues
Of Saddam-Allah-W.Bush-Guevara
From their core.
I watched
As the bravest of my peers
Broke dances
Of shattered shins
And skull-splitting
Child squeals.
I listened to the guns;
They fired in
Morse code messages.
I consumed
Such frightening images
While they consumed each other;
In the night
Gabriel came
And confided in
Me.
With burnt black robes
And the feathers of a hawk
He told me
“Thou shalt trust
in the name of Yahweh”
And I wept.
When I wept
I felt not ashamed.
My father
And his father before
Had wept
Unashamed
And Like me
Hid in the noose-marked
Webs of societal psalms.
When I wept,
My tears bore strength
For children
Learning to read with
One eye and
One parent--
Sleeping in a war zone
Bombshell lullabies.
I wept
For the couple
Who would not know love,
And pay too much money
To make their love
Undone,
And for the men
Too ignorant
To sew their mouths
And ease their
Fiery grudge;
I wept
For lonely women
With growing bellies
And lonely bedrooms-
Lonely hearts-
And for the occupants of the bellies themselves
Who would be thrust
Into a
Lonely life.
Pressure swept the atmosphere
And dew precipitated,
Gathering in bundles
On decaying clay edifices
Still warm from shrapnel
The night before,
And on the eyelashes
Of the 8-year-old
Wingless angels
Who survived
The Jihad/
9/11-retribution
Blasts.
Gabriel told me:
Thou shalt trust
In thine own self,
For each alone
Is angelic.
Trust
And live forever.
//ww
Through the streets
Of nameless cities,
Meeting and greeting
And smiling
Through shaken hands.
Though every extended pore
Seems to breathe out
Slightly,
They remain forever
Breathless in a vacuum
Of sour patchwork overcoats
And intelligible tightrope rogues.
I watched
As the greatest men
Spewed bile and concrete statues
Of Saddam-Allah-W.Bush-Guevara
From their core.
I watched
As the bravest of my peers
Broke dances
Of shattered shins
And skull-splitting
Child squeals.
I listened to the guns;
They fired in
Morse code messages.
I consumed
Such frightening images
While they consumed each other;
In the night
Gabriel came
And confided in
Me.
With burnt black robes
And the feathers of a hawk
He told me
“Thou shalt trust
in the name of Yahweh”
And I wept.
When I wept
I felt not ashamed.
My father
And his father before
Had wept
Unashamed
And Like me
Hid in the noose-marked
Webs of societal psalms.
When I wept,
My tears bore strength
For children
Learning to read with
One eye and
One parent--
Sleeping in a war zone
Bombshell lullabies.
I wept
For the couple
Who would not know love,
And pay too much money
To make their love
Undone,
And for the men
Too ignorant
To sew their mouths
And ease their
Fiery grudge;
I wept
For lonely women
With growing bellies
And lonely bedrooms-
Lonely hearts-
And for the occupants of the bellies themselves
Who would be thrust
Into a
Lonely life.
Pressure swept the atmosphere
And dew precipitated,
Gathering in bundles
On decaying clay edifices
Still warm from shrapnel
The night before,
And on the eyelashes
Of the 8-year-old
Wingless angels
Who survived
The Jihad/
9/11-retribution
Blasts.
Gabriel told me:
Thou shalt trust
In thine own self,
For each alone
Is angelic.
Trust
And live forever.
//ww