If you asked the ages of man throughout its convoluted history,
from where comes this rage upon Eve and her daughters,
unto the land of Cain and his father,
there would be only lines of poetry on this page,
a million poets with pens in hand
like flowers for Algernon.

Katana blades rust where samurais rest, no signatures can be found
the sword has been turned on
its side and looks like a plowshare by those who
hunger and those that thirst; the wells not yet dug ooze water
from deep inside the heart that is dark without compassion,
the field lies fallow, the hills set ablaze.

The light of awareness dawns sans weapons
without means, there is no meaning but what
life gives to life, Who can tell me
why a War of Roses can last a hundred years?
Oh, Peter, your face is a river drowning in fire.
My limbs turn blue in the cold and my face blisters
red in the sun, my dearest Mother, you taught me
well if not better;
but this is the Age of Ghettos where voices blast
past the courage of open windows, beating the music,
beating the persistence of youth stiffly with words they leave
behind like drugs on your brain, lost in labyrinths
running barefoot in MacArthur's Park
running with time unabated, with icing on callow faces,
yellow daisies in wrinkled hands.

The prosecution of the witness rests
with the rawness of courage to rail against
its own weeping light
but there are holes in theories, there are holes in
the summer sky before evolution rounds the bend
and rushes down the thinker's veins
awakened from slabs of marble, slabs of stone
sheets of muslin covering the scourge of the body
of its Omo art;

there is a truth that must be cdemanded: give me liberty
and give me breath, let the metaphors
unfold, not even a singular thing has the answer
to what can not be asked ringing out like gunshots in the
dark, like a wolf's howl under the moon, sudden in its infancy,
or the moment before a cluster bomb
in the small brown hands of your child explodes
and kills your olive trees, your home, your inheritance
and your genetic lineage,
the bite from the falling apple will not change
the paths already traveled, but from where the deepest
ocean trench branches out, the alien mother ship abandoned,
the call of love echoes
of distance not yet traveled, and here the burning bush
flames high with the song of the willow to an empty sky,
here another poet dies with poems never read in litanies
of' a paler shade of white.
Like lovers reunited.