well shit. i'd planned on heading to the open mic night tonight at Cafe Aroma, but i found out after reading a few of my works beforehand, to warm up and try to figure out how best to deliver them, that i couldn't speak for shit tonight. My head is still a bit stuffed up, so my enunciation just kept going to shit. sometimes i suck at enunciating anyways, and tend to run my words together, so tonight was just an extension of that, and if i'm going to read, i'd like to give it my all. So i decided to just camp out at home instead and take a night off, and perhaps hit next week's open mic night before i take off for Guatemala on the 16th.

Instead of reading, then, i wrote! Here's my latest experiment in channeling the creative flow. I hope you're having a stellar night, reader, and that you're happy and feeling just fine. Dream sweetly tonight.

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the desert cave Antarctic

1/6/05

come desert land
fly toward me on wings
of blue corn sunsets, roll to me
over sand highways the color of coal
and flood over me
like a flow of white smiles
and the scent of unwashed hair
on a southerly gale

as your eastern torch rises I’ll scream out
in a muffled cry the names of the ones
let go
the little girls and great kings forsaken
and after my voice shatters, goes hoarse from a list
long and endless
I’ll grasp my hat and
wander off alone
as I do in times like these, this night, bitter and dark
down that coal-dust road
but don’t worry, it’s just sand
and dead tears beneath these old heels,
grains of nothing peppering a land
sucked dry of the verdant god I seek

and over this land that floats to me, the one I walk over
like a vagabond zombie
I feel you, taste you on the wind and hear you
in the clouds
and in the sky I see molten hate ejected from your
volcano eyes, engorged orbs that spill turpentine
and light the grass aflame
blessing this land in a death that screams
and curses your name
beneath the stars

but it’s a weak, comatose loathing
at its center, and stands little chance
against the antiseptic unforgiving sandpaper surface
of this desert reality drifting my way –
these little red stones littering my path
hold resilient to your white fury

here, I walk protected in the holiest of
shrines, impenetrable and
beyond you, at the cusp of myself –
just a windblown Johnny Appleseed
on a scenic byway,
the great divide