"shock & awe" drone

the bombs are falling
in my sleep,
in yours
how many bodies fall
with souls inside
down

those planes stuck
in the top floors
burning people
toppling tower
2 then 1 or 1 then 2,
no one’s in them

they’re drones
programmed to blitz
innocence and guilt
alike but
those bombs I say
are not american

say it outright
who gives a shit
if osama bin laden’s
norteamericano
henchman
dies by drone

say it straight
those planes demonic
killed three thousand
in Baghdad
and New York
don’t tell me they’re
not worse

don’t tell me
it’s ok to kill kids
with guns,
ok to kill with bombs,
not ok with faceless
soulless drones

& the hair-trigger
operator works
the shift,
goes home to sleep
as another’s
lowered into earth

& my brother,
my sister?
Who am I to say
what’s right
& wrong
more than you


(6 February 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Latticework

MIX

I am stunned by amalgamation
one body mixing with another
in gyroscopic glee, passion can
turn against itself, take for granted,
they say, passion ever unaltered.
Men gone down into the earth emerge.



AT THE BOTTOM OF A FRESHWATER LAKE

Love goes to bathe in the lake’s splash
where toes straddle the shore and squish.

Love, you are she in whom I bathe,
our fountain overflowing years.

Love, you say you can’t and then do.
When you pause, our glow does not age.

Love, the wreck was named for someone
who was not F. Scott Fitzgerald.



IN THE HOSPITAL OF MY HEAD

the stains become scars,
the other way round is not a circle

trap moths like birds, the dipper descending
into well water

I wake peeing from the medication,
I rage at beauties

daimon hidden among trees, barely glimpsed,
is it high up? There?

if the sky could speak
we would insist it learn to read and write

we have no tombs, we poor, headstones only
hear the worms murmur

where may we go when our watch is ended?
pull down gravity

(3, 5 February 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

"floycealexander," by Bobby St. Clair

“Diddiers lay up the highway to Fort Smith.
Outdoor dancehall with tight canvas canopy.
Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys sometimes played.
My father and mother went dancing weekends
with Richard and Goldie Bartlett, parents of
Virginia who stayed in Greenwood sitting me,
I an only son, she my first love thirteen
years older. Her father worked in the coal mines
with my father. Her mother trellised her teen-
aged blossoming. The two families kept on
dancing until the war began in Poland.
My father, Manuel, moved my mother, Lorene,
to the city where I was born. There, he worked
at Camp Chaffee, the army base. He became
a fireman. Virginia still sat with me. We
grew older, I was still thirteen years younger.

“With Pearl Harbor we moved north to Wichita.
My father helped assemble Boeing airplanes
through the four years of America’s Second
World War. In Kansas, at five I started school.
I saw Virginia weekends when we drove south,
‘home’ my father called it, though he hated his.
He thought first and finally of leaving there:
Arkansas, where he was born at Mine 18,
now called Old Jenny Lind; Drusilla widowed
in Lequire, Oklahoma, though Abe was shot
and killed in Sallisaw. He left her children–
five sons, twin son and daughter, twin daughters dead.
When the war ended, my father took us north
to live out his days, then my mother’s, and I
go on living, my love of fifty-three years
shivering me still now we’ve dwelled the compass
points of a continent and found its center.”

(5 February 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Mary

Once he returns to drive Cristina’s car
and is stopping at stop lights that turn red,
inspiring him to try to invent one
with amber and green to hang in his mind,
he sees Mary one day crossing with child.
She got what she wanted. A mother now,
she looks the same as she looked in high school
and in bed when once she turned her dark eyes
on him saying, Give me a child or leave . . .
though having borrowed his King James Bible
she called to say she’d bring it back as soon
as she returned from where her new husband
was going, New York, to sign a contract
for his first novel. Her ultimatum
to him preceded Old Friend’s arrival
from Honolulu where her daddy was
when she was born to surf in Waikiki
and met her handsome blond-haired lover man
who calls the mainland, then elopes with her.
It must be his baby boy. She looks back
at Bobby, holds her gaze as he holds his.
She goes on with that fiery twitch of ass
she loved to fling all night across the floor
when they partied with the Greeks all weekend
back in the day they thought would never end.

She’s still slim and walks like she said she did
after riding with the big wave to shore,
still standing, and donned only the muumuu
she missed in Seattle. The light turns green.
She’s on the other side. He wants to yell,
Bring back Henrietta's King James Bible! 
but thinks, Pack it home under your muumuu,
baby, like any missionary whore.

(4 February 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Who Fills This Mirror?

Here goes another misstep.
But rest easy, 
mind sweeper,
Lacan will come later, for
for now I don’t know what
mirror he reflects,
mother in the child
or child in the mother?
To begin to move
us through this eyewitness gallery,
maybe Freud will do
an encore like the dead do
to get Jacques up and
going.

(3 February 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Bobby on Bloomsday

He can't read Ulysses when attending Finnegans Wake.
He has every good intention to absorb rivery wordache
not even Secretary Sam Beckett could easily unriddle.
Bobby’s too old to bear the weight of Stephen's spells,
too young to give Leopold Bloom the benefit of doubt,
who desires that Molly stay faithful so they may harvest
June 14 in eternity's quick flow of their Liffey passion
whose blood streams as long as a body's flesh and bone.

Is it work to open the book to puzzle history’s nightmare 
I would wake from? I walk along the lovely-bodied shore
where Gerty MacDowell sports her parasol as I undress
this lass for Nighttown where my darling Molly resides,
or so reads her soul's diary, even when home in her bed,
her passions swelling to burst open long-dammed flesh.
When I lived on Forty-fifth Street one year I slept alone,
I dreamed she lay with me and was my love, mine own.

Stars jape at stars. Mock my fury. Who's tied to Earth?
See crescendo roll off horizon's level, spray old wounds.
Drenched. Endured. As sky leaves a sun-print of clouds.
I would read a section to learn where history turns myth,
walk the demonic streets under a moon's florescent light
until daybreak. And I wrote, Nothing avails a lad too shy
in the midst of working women. May I warm your coffee?
And when I get up to go: If you like, I'll stop by tonight. 

No. Yes. Maybe. I don’t know. I need work. Dawn rises
with rain's fall. Seattle's no Paris; still, I could grow wise
where madronas weep, if I learned to breathe patiently
here, not in Dublin or Trieste. Sleep sinks below the sea,
the book left upside down, still open on my boyish chest.
I dream her voice continues. She's not old, no one's lost,
but we age inside. When I wake and read what I wrote,
I pour my seed over rock and sand. That much I waste.

(2 February 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Your House, Crow's House

Sleek, black, beaked, a furl of feathers, wicked looker staring back.
Splayed feet, big spaces between what I call your five toes, beauty.
Tracks that leave snowshoe prints. Snow once or twice a year, usually.
Gone like rain into dry earth. Two eyes across the road. Good luck.

(1 February 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander