What Remains

The little demons appear after dark to survey what’s left.
It’s never much. They frisk and flounce and dance until day breaks through.
They’ve known since birth what’s coming. All that remains to be done
is live it. There is no language like theirs. That’s why they’re demons.
What new world could ever do them proud? They have their own. Hear them
listen. When the sky purples the rest of the day glides west.

(18 May 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

To Whom

Insane but innocuous to himself.
Waddle like a walking whale to breakfast.
He says so little you remember what
he said yesterday or the day before,
his minimal reply to the person
speaking who finally stopped and waited.
It takes a day or so, one life or more.
No reason to forget life at the ranch.
Senoritas in their summer getup.
Huevos rancheros whenever he wished.
Enchiladas by design served only
once a day, if that, by the senora.
The smell of the land wafting from horses
who let no one ride new in the saddle.
Cicada nights. Cicada days. Summer.
The Chevy pickup he learned to drive in.
Grandfather’s mother, grandmother’s father
never spoke of dying, not in ingles.
Their daughter only through their son’s marriage
loved them much more than their son said he did.
Why he remembers only life with her.
How strange his life is to him here. Remote.
He arrived here only to be with her.
Her olive skin. Voluptuous body.
Bright thoughts emerging through her ruby lips.
Her dancing smile. Cheeks glowing. Her pleasure.
She talked to animals and they listened.
Not so to him. He lived too far inside.

In here? Why not farther south, on the ranch?
Backward. Where time is. To whom will listen.

(17 May 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Tournament

In the event, one defeated and killed
another. The sky wept. Convenient
as that sounds. Like someone sweeping the floor.
A cripple climbing then descending stairs.
Or a dog following the killer’s scent.
The victim. So much was loosed on the world.

Where do killers go to kill the willing?
for one may kill if they do not die young.
Only two spar where there is but one slave.
She goes home with the victor to make love
a duel. Only fitting for one who weeps
in the morning after his restless sleep.

Fast forward millennia to a war.
A young man, a brave one, fights on a field
far away. If he stayed home, he’d be weird,
do dope, drink, sleep late, never be aware
what he misses now he will reap later,
though he knows, too, there is no end to war.

Who does not prefer to remember those
no one could know? To whom nothing happens.
They live if they leave early. It is late,
others like him are wandering the streets.
They have guns. They give him a knife. He kills
quickly. There are too many guns. He falls.

In real life men are locked into cages
until one is dead. When the gate opens,
nothing is the same. He finds his mother
if he dies. He never had a father
if he wins. He knows a woman, a man,
not some god, carries us into old age.

(16 May 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Memory with Eyes

  1

There’s always a country different from yours.
Where the air is not so close. Where storms are
about to rage or raging already,
land sliding away and people with it.

You have learned to live here. You go nowhere.
How does it feel to live between oceans?
Like a river, you say. Always running.
Between two banks. Nothing like a sea shore.

What’s yours is mine, so now I can say I
am waking, sleeping, eating, and loving
in a way only you know how to do,
it is nothing like the way I was born.

When storms come here rivers dry up. Water
sucked upward by such air never returns.
When I go to sleep with problems, a dream
may turn to say, I am your solution.

I start for one coast and reach the other.
I like to get lost. Anything to live.
There are so many here who never leave.
They are fortunate to know where they are.

Unlike me, they stay. If they have problems,
they ask until they get the right answer.
They know I am one who can only ask.
Sometimes they come to me to ask for them.

2

No one knows a native from an exile.
One of the two knows how to stay alive
by learning to sacrifice the other.
There is a third one, Memory with Eyes.

When you can see nothing this one sees it,
though there are some things better forgotten
if not left invisible. This one, say:
Memory with Eyes you see vanishes.

Then you have to find another somewhere.
That means it must find you because it loves
to be needed. Something with no body.
Something that would trade memory for flesh.

This outlier anomalous inside
evokes without words the absence of names
in a country that is nothing but sky
whose clouds are letters of the alphabet.

(15 May 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

In the Cave

In the cave I can read Plato when I’m not viewing films
whose theory is they are our images parading the wall,
if light upon shadow is who we are or will become.
I can hope against hope the planet will find a door
that opens to let life crawl through. Welcome the sun
like a long-lost relative whose warmth is native to touch.

In the cave the film adaptation of Plato’s Republic
means little to the elders. They remember the soldiers
and the slaves,. They lived through the perfection
and found the hole at the other end of the long corridor
by following the streaming light projecting the new life.
I am one of the old people now. I have too much to say.

But I listen. The nighthawks pursue the bats for a meal
and sleep with the sounds of human breath echoing here
where dreams have become more prophecy than memory.
When my love tells me I have no wrinkles in my skin, 
I count myself among those who have yet to begin to live.
Let the fire in her eyes glow brightly and our life begin.

(14 May 2013) 

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Jinni Land

I am not with it when I first appear,
it takes me years
to find the tempo
to turn a lost cause on its head
and see it from underground
where they live and I must never go.

(13 May 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

. . . and Over

As for Dee, why say
the night is his
for the taking . . .
He knows how he lives
and why.

I was a whore once
on Miami Beach,
where the rich guys
come looking for you
to ask you, How much?
or Cuanto?
It’s a living.
My old man was gone,
mother sold herself,
she said I wasn’t
too good to let men
fuck me, she did . . .

He puts his book
back on the shelf.
Memoirs in progress,
he calls it Poe,
not Dee,
sharpens his pencil
and sleeps for an hour,
maybe two, but up
in time
for closing time.
That’s when the marks
appear outside,
wait for you to score.
They love to offer
themselves.

I comb my blond mane
and let it hang
to my shoulders,
leaving my bed
to work in theirs.

(12 May 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander