We bring ourselves out at dawn. We have work.
Why did none of us think of this before . . .
The birds are making their curlicues with butterflies
between their restless, insatiable wings.
We are here to do what needs to be done.
Sun rises: augur and pick bore and chip
and open a hole in the earth we hope leads us
where we need to go. When the fires of noon
have climbed and pause above us, we take rest.
Soon the work will be rekindled. We do not know
who we are. Maybe we will find identity
at the bottom, once we have reached the site,
even if we die getting there. Or we may open the door,
more alive than before and nothing left to do, as now.
(30-31 July 2013)
copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Rant
The priest filling in for God is telling his flock
they may come to Mass for the wrong reasons.
I hold up one hand and ask, Why are you here?
I love God, he says.
How do you know you love God for the right reasons?
He then orders me expelled from the parish.
Ushers hustle down the aisle to take me out.
I thank them for letting me take the sun,
adding, It beats hell out of that crypt filled with cattle.
I let the bright day furnish my home with a dream.
The excommunication process begins.
I am asked why I asked the priest why he was at the Mass.
Ask God, I reply. You know the answers,
I say: He’s more a scold than a priest.
(28 July 2013)
copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander
they may come to Mass for the wrong reasons.
I hold up one hand and ask, Why are you here?
I love God, he says.
How do you know you love God for the right reasons?
He then orders me expelled from the parish.
Ushers hustle down the aisle to take me out.
I thank them for letting me take the sun,
adding, It beats hell out of that crypt filled with cattle.
I let the bright day furnish my home with a dream.
The excommunication process begins.
I am asked why I asked the priest why he was at the Mass.
Ask God, I reply. You know the answers,
I say: He’s more a scold than a priest.
(28 July 2013)
copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander
Monastery
In his usual state of sexual arousal
the septuagenarian alone remembers
the women who loved with him, one by one,
before Cathleen said yes a second time.
The day yawns and the sun rises.
The quiet’s what he’s not used to.
Twenty-some years here and he cannot run
in the forest naked along his private path.
The legs walk against water and that way
he hopes to heal. The woman who helps him
could be his daughter. He loathes what age does
to a randy old man who trades masturbation
for sublimation. Juices withheld from the air
form little clouds of images and thoughts
he remembers from Mandrake the Magician.
Reading comics in his youth prepared him
for what? Making the only movie he tried,
recalling the colors, black and white included,
what he later learned words could make him see
more clearly, so much so he is a monk
in his own castle on a Greek island,
who rises at dawn, yes, in gratitude
to the maker for one more day to love
as he would love a woman who’s still here.
(25 July 2013)
copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander
the septuagenarian alone remembers
the women who loved with him, one by one,
before Cathleen said yes a second time.
The day yawns and the sun rises.
The quiet’s what he’s not used to.
Twenty-some years here and he cannot run
in the forest naked along his private path.
The legs walk against water and that way
he hopes to heal. The woman who helps him
could be his daughter. He loathes what age does
to a randy old man who trades masturbation
for sublimation. Juices withheld from the air
form little clouds of images and thoughts
he remembers from Mandrake the Magician.
Reading comics in his youth prepared him
for what? Making the only movie he tried,
recalling the colors, black and white included,
what he later learned words could make him see
more clearly, so much so he is a monk
in his own castle on a Greek island,
who rises at dawn, yes, in gratitude
to the maker for one more day to love
as he would love a woman who’s still here.
(25 July 2013)
copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
. . . or Already Here
Storms happen inside the heart. Gasp for air.
The body is attacked by the weather.
Now to the past tense. Who is this speaking?
I can’t see anybody listening.
I want to grow fins. Be with her in the sea.
I think she must be waiting there for me.
(22, 24 July 2013)
copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander
The body is attacked by the weather.
Now to the past tense. Who is this speaking?
I can’t see anybody listening.
I want to grow fins. Be with her in the sea.
I think she must be waiting there for me.
(22, 24 July 2013)
copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander
Look What's Coming
If eyes can’t see what’s coming, look inside.
Not all is rave. But it will be savage.
The sky under the skull will fold and wind
rule, heat be met by cold and the earth torn
into little shreds, a thousand islands
with nobody left to swim between them.
(22 July 2013)
copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander
Not all is rave. But it will be savage.
The sky under the skull will fold and wind
rule, heat be met by cold and the earth torn
into little shreds, a thousand islands
with nobody left to swim between them.
(22 July 2013)
copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander
Denouement
(Summer 2013)
Welcome to Conservative America
ripping and shredding the Constitution.
Stand Your Ground is a law in twenty-two states,
whereas the Constitution of the United States is mute
on Stand Your Ground . . . or is it a rider
originally attached to the Second Amendment?
A man with a car on neighborhood watch
inside a place with gates opening into walls
pursues a black teenager walking home
with iced tea and candy to watch the All-Star game.
The telephone dispatcher orders the man not to follow,
but he does, he gets his gun ready, opens the car door.
His defense states the dead boy bashed defendant’s head
on concrete. The photo of his bloody face bears no date.
The jury finds him Not Guilty. He gets his gun back.
Jump-cut to two cars side by side in fast-food
drive-through lanes, a man and woman waiting
beside boys who rock with the rap on their radio.
The man tells them to turn their music down.
They don’t. The man kills one with his shotgun.
Later the woman confesses they’d been drinking
at some event where you drink only to signal
camraderie. She says she told him off
once they were home. This may be how the law will go:
The last one walked, throw the book at the next.
If we claim the Bible says that wives
are their husbands’ chattel, we are its clarion,
not the Bible’s race of Ham,
Jehovah’s wrath, Solomon’s sword . . .
Let’s go get us a . . . Fill it in . . .
A husband is dead set on raping his wife.
She gets a gun and fires anywhere
away from him. She gets twenty years.
Her husband is black like her. The white man
he idolizes is the atavistic one,
he of the master race.
A woman has the right to abort what a man
saddles her with. Why must she
pay for his uninvited, unbridled desire?
(22-23, 24 July 2013)
copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander
Welcome to Conservative America
ripping and shredding the Constitution.
Stand Your Ground is a law in twenty-two states,
whereas the Constitution of the United States is mute
on Stand Your Ground . . . or is it a rider
originally attached to the Second Amendment?
A man with a car on neighborhood watch
inside a place with gates opening into walls
pursues a black teenager walking home
with iced tea and candy to watch the All-Star game.
The telephone dispatcher orders the man not to follow,
but he does, he gets his gun ready, opens the car door.
His defense states the dead boy bashed defendant’s head
on concrete. The photo of his bloody face bears no date.
The jury finds him Not Guilty. He gets his gun back.
Jump-cut to two cars side by side in fast-food
drive-through lanes, a man and woman waiting
beside boys who rock with the rap on their radio.
The man tells them to turn their music down.
They don’t. The man kills one with his shotgun.
Later the woman confesses they’d been drinking
at some event where you drink only to signal
camraderie. She says she told him off
once they were home. This may be how the law will go:
The last one walked, throw the book at the next.
If we claim the Bible says that wives
are their husbands’ chattel, we are its clarion,
not the Bible’s race of Ham,
Jehovah’s wrath, Solomon’s sword . . .
Let’s go get us a . . . Fill it in . . .
A husband is dead set on raping his wife.
She gets a gun and fires anywhere
away from him. She gets twenty years.
Her husband is black like her. The white man
he idolizes is the atavistic one,
he of the master race.
A woman has the right to abort what a man
saddles her with. Why must she
pay for his uninvited, unbridled desire?
(22-23, 24 July 2013)
copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander
The Names
Two young black men in Florida lie slain,
Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis,
their names joining Emmett Till’s
in Mississippi and the many thousands gone
before, all sacrificed to the gods of power,
those who murder calmly to see them die:
“You work all your life for me, then die.
We brought you here from Africa.
We made our own dream come true,
why don’t you? We used whips then:
we herded you out to do the labor.
We use guns now: we need your progeny
dead. We will always stand our ground.
And soon we’ll have our country back!”
Gilead
“Give me children or I die. There’s more than one meaning to it.”
--The Handmaid’s Tale
I pick up where I left the 1985 novel
by Margaret Atwood of Ontario
imagining how women may be forced to live
the future if fiction becomes the truth . . .
should the bastards have their way.
The State’s babies will belladonna from
the wombs of women enslaved by men.
Nolite te bastardos carborundorum. *
This Year Like Others
Men stand in line with women seeking jobs,
Far too many have no shelter, clothing, food.
The rich have taken everything.
Nixon, Reagan, Daddy Bush and Junior
have led them to their promised land.
The gods put us closer to Canada than Florida.
Annie Henry lives here, sometimes in Jacksonville.
Annie’s folks were black Georgia sharecroppers.
Annie’s here much of the year. Her river Jordan
runs through Bemidji. We sing together:
I, Wayfaring Stranger; and she, Jacob’s Ladder.
My love plays piano. Our blonde daughter
(or so we like to pretend) was born poor
but sings like an angel her song As a Deer . . .
I am blessed to be loved by women,
I who have not yet turned my hand against a man.
* Don’t let the bastards grind you down.
(20-21, 24 July 2013)
copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander
Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis,
their names joining Emmett Till’s
in Mississippi and the many thousands gone
before, all sacrificed to the gods of power,
those who murder calmly to see them die:
“You work all your life for me, then die.
We brought you here from Africa.
We made our own dream come true,
why don’t you? We used whips then:
we herded you out to do the labor.
We use guns now: we need your progeny
dead. We will always stand our ground.
And soon we’ll have our country back!”
Gilead
“Give me children or I die. There’s more than one meaning to it.”
--The Handmaid’s Tale
I pick up where I left the 1985 novel
by Margaret Atwood of Ontario
imagining how women may be forced to live
the future if fiction becomes the truth . . .
should the bastards have their way.
The State’s babies will belladonna from
the wombs of women enslaved by men.
Nolite te bastardos carborundorum. *
This Year Like Others
Men stand in line with women seeking jobs,
Far too many have no shelter, clothing, food.
The rich have taken everything.
Nixon, Reagan, Daddy Bush and Junior
have led them to their promised land.
The gods put us closer to Canada than Florida.
Annie Henry lives here, sometimes in Jacksonville.
Annie’s folks were black Georgia sharecroppers.
Annie’s here much of the year. Her river Jordan
runs through Bemidji. We sing together:
I, Wayfaring Stranger; and she, Jacob’s Ladder.
My love plays piano. Our blonde daughter
(or so we like to pretend) was born poor
but sings like an angel her song As a Deer . . .
I am blessed to be loved by women,
I who have not yet turned my hand against a man.
* Don’t let the bastards grind you down.
(20-21, 24 July 2013)
copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander
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