Long

Just a smile would lighten everything
maybe a picture of you on my desk
and then unfold my day
the predictable pain cuts through
I look at you with wide eyes
I wonder about your tattoo
Why I had mine
Its
A paragraph
on my back
that lines me up with so many people from new york
to make a poem of human skin
a story known
only
to the writer


I dreamed I was awake
I should have known it was a dream
I am not a modern American shogun
I do not carry
A razor sharp katana
My enemies
Do not wonder, wide eyed, if they are actually cut
then slide apart before our eyes


Oh, but
Just for clever conversation
Didn't you tell me god was a man
born
from a carpenter's finger?
Didn't
armies rape
Israel
on their way to the Egyptian theatre
and then again
back to Rome S.P.O.R.C

L'insignificance

I think of brown skinned women
Damnatio Memoriae
Dust storms that take the paint right off my car
I think of a sunrise over Baghdad
My mind drifts as we talk
I smile
listening more closely that you could know
But not so closely that you can't tell if I'm faded

Things are easy to recognize
Against the barren Moonscapes of West Texas

I hear the sound of an indian sitar
and scottish bagpipes
Everyone dances
in unison

We line up around the world.
The word on my chest - or is it my back
a phrase on your breast
the sentence upon the skin of a man's arm
the comma on your side
two nipples line up to make punctuation
and tell our story
and its not very long
but it seems to find
open mind


We whisper to each other
A nurse in Nova Scotia, A wife in Calcutta.
A coder in Chicago. An Engineer in Wisconsin
When the night is still
I can hear the snow fall
Such a short time to be here
Such a long time to be gone
.. Tucson Arizona fur coated revolver (don't let me down).