My Subjects: An Ode

The world is my subject; its inundated streets,

where rats tear flesh from corpses as they float

with garbage hauled by floodwaters through

breached levees to lakes. My subject is the

terrible disgrace I see on victim's faces everywhere,

and the bared teeth of rage; the eyes emptied of hope

and tears, the parched mouths of infants

trembling in their mothers arms and finally stiffening.

I cannot turn from noon. Nor can I let it blind me.

I will not turn toward twilight without pointing the light

within my spirit at night's hidden shadows.

The world is my subject; rifles fired by black kids

in the jungles and deserts of a continent

ruled by liars who stuff pockets already full

of bribes with gold stolen from men and women

dying of too little and too soon. My subject is the words

shouted at the ears of a world deaf from rustling

the currencies of profit from resources of the poor, sold

with contracts signed at tables of corruption by governors

dressed like honest men, in robes filched from history.

Imagination is at war with reality. I will not turn away.

The blind eye of rhetoric senses the intensity of colors

it can't see. Who'll write the poem of earth?

Naftali Reyes dozes in the hollow of his deathbed

Surrounded by whirring bees worrying the rainbow

of flowers in the garden that stops at the open doors

of the grave room. His subject was his life on earth,

not earth itself. He saw and felt love is not enough.

The woman at his bedside attends to his hoarse breaths,

sometimes coming in series, then laboring singly

until carbolic silence fills a tighter universe with loss.

My subject is brutality. I see a grown man in camouflage,

a gold five-pointed star with a state seal, tossing one

living cat after the other at the sky for target practice.

This could be New Orleans, Biloxi, a wedge of Mobile,

any spot on the Gulf where poverty has lived dangerously

for years. The rich have cars, insurance, and connections.

Their homes are dry. Brutality is a style of governing, mainly

of ignoring the needs of victims whose eyes flood with impotence.

The metronome of reality stops before fables of endless life,

its wordless seclusion in dust. Worms are the citizens

of eternity, the legislators of decay. We may die once only

but we only live once, as well; shadows on pale walls

or long songs carried by winds to the clouds. Nothing affects

Nature at its core, neither chaos, entropy, nor ephemera.

Whatever beside ourselves that determines the journey

from life to death, it reveals no secrets, except in mute acts.

The exultation and agony of living are the borders of

evolution. Everyday life is abnormal, mastered by intricacies

of new and passionate mythologies. I persist.

My subject is the way to prevail over the madness of meaning.

Words stack like plates in birds-eye maple cabinets,

carefully, if one cracks, the porcelain tower changes, a meal

can't be served. We are speaking of analogies, of metaphors—

the semaphore of meaning. Sentences break like plates,

caesuras are the yellow lights of intention. They warn thoughts

that meaning may change tracks. Even hyperbole must bow

before the altar of simile. Syntax is the weightlifter who carries

clarity in her brawny arms. She dare not stumble. Purple certainties

hang from lobes, jeweled rules; lighthouses that direct us to senses.

I have awakened often in the darkness before dawn and seen light

from cars speeding from sleep to purpose or from purpose to sleep,

curving across the ceiling and vanishing down the wall. I have

wondered what it meant, that light could drive darkness away,

if only for a moment. In my youth I called it death's signal, even

though no one near me died. As my world grew larger, nothing

changed except perception. Now I know Death collects many I can

neither know nor hear about. Meaning is a tiny neighborhood

whose borders are the limits of what we know. Glowing mushrooms

hover in the corners of consciousness, waiting to obliterate all dawns.

We live in leaden times whose crisis grew as we continually failed

to reconcile the rights of all to personal desires while shrinking

the misery of the masses imperceptibly. Ill will is sanforized.

My subject is blue trees on mauve islands in green seas.

It is easy to abduct reality from the traditions that begot

it, that form the gene pool where it swims. Poets commit this

crime every hour in the burly world as sanguine slaves

of languages that wall in their volatile visions: Old songs

translated by varnished guitars into chill pizzicatos

whose rippling tunes becalm the nervous pigeons resting on

the cables of rusting bridges. I have tried to outrun my shadow

like everyone who seeks the fountain of originality. Only

the future with its inextinguishable light will tell

if I made it, if I left at least one line miraculous as a breath.