Body Language

You let the gimp get you down, gringo.
The rules say, Keep moving and soon
the oil will flow lubricating your bones.
Your hair is leaving the House of Skull.
Your lip splits when you wear the mask
that breathes for you and makes you sleep.
You can’t feel anything even when you dream.
The air comes in and the air goes out.
The days look like they come together now.
The nights don’t know, for reasons I gave.
There’s little to say that fingers don’t say.
You could go to mass and ask God’s mercy.
Ask why he lets fat men rule the poor folk.
Ask why he lets them rule over the earth.
Ask why he doesn’t tornado their fortunes
and hurricane them into the arms of the needy.
Don’t bother asking him to prove his existence.
He’s most likely not only fat and rich but white.
Was it Moses wrote Nobody Knows the Trouble
I’ve seen?

U joints. Axle grease. Lube job. Differential check.
Put up on the hoist and looking up into the dark:
There’s the hair from the body of the dead deer
struck and run over where the lights were shining.
The heart keeps pumping but it can’t keep time
with the others. The blood flows, the brain works,
the body stands, the feet move, get used to the way
you don’t walk like the young man with black hair
and swarthy hue, the worker who worked every day
and sometimes every night you could find to pay
your way through the exacting world of humanity
that must die either sooner or later, don’t worry.
The body has nobody to blame but an errant mind.
Which any mind is if it fails to put the body first.
In the noumenal world, where mind resides, who knows
what changes there before the deathly events occur?
The well-oiled, well-tuned, high-performance machine
is all we will let live, more and more, down coming days
whose nights are dreamed and mares fight stallions
for daylight.

(30 April 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander