POEM

How often to hear that one has 
left behind a great body of work
when I just want to leave behind 
a great body for a glorified body
in the future. In the future, I will open 
the doors of my father’s fragile face & 
I will discover masks of all types in each 
room. I will put on each mask & wait 
for a haunting dissonance to call out 
to my historicity on some blue-green 
African-night of Marlowe’s madness 
uncovering “true emotions”. My pity 
has pliars to peel off feigning faces 
of wax. I love deeply anyway, although 
I burn crablike dense-red in the oven 
of my father’s soul. Why is Mammon 
a god that keeps you clothed in werewolf 
cover-up body-armour, pinching you  
underneath the dermis? You are like 
a deceased philosopher, fleshless amidst 
the “congregation of the dead”. I’m like 
dice tossed to & fro & yonderways 
in a multiverse, in a flesh unrepelled 
by mixups, like the ‘yoke’ or the ‘yolk’ 
or an oar of hours grooving to the churning 
butter blues in every single hurting, angry, 
painful soul in this nation. . . . Nation of 
what-now? Ancient Rome mocks from 
the dust & ashes of the stubble of heavy 
iniquity, delighting oneself with one’s “self” . . . 
Hear my cry, O Yahweh, as Life’s 
venom-sting creates molten brass out of 
the stones of our hardened hearts! Hair 
of horses, I feel soft with Your peace, 
mane-flowing of Your spirit, flowing 
like I do somewhat quaint & faint like 
activating sunlight through the moon, 
& just now I see something so beautiful 
that I have become it.