Still Life

My missing you has gathered me into weariness,
a basket weaving class and classical music draws out the edge of spite.
Afghans swathed around me in the screen light, a flat screen of images,
Afgani snipers, snippets of blood, waterless and thirsty, blighted.
Rock is just rock, it crumbles, smashes, and gets blown to rubble.
We sometimes or, most times lie underneath it.
A quivering hand touches the sunlight
and the blood clots, coagulates, dries.
It too blows away, leaving the iron smells of a butcher-shop
with a hint of something else, the dying light of your presence.
Life means something little to some unless,
you are somebody or someone but most important to truth,
you are something to fight for or fight against.
Many people are here today and could disappear
into the sun or they could block it out if they had wings.
The wingless ones to most are just dead turtles
without shells washed up on the beaches with the sea snails
and jelly fish, resting underneath the sand rubbles and castles,
housing the pricks and thieves, endangering the night,
and you did not come here to drown from water sports and oil slicks.
You are here for me and to buy a dress and a necklace and
you wait for me and I do eventually come around to
your palace of things and what nots, and who has what
and who isn't anything and why try, but try is what I must,
or they will laugh and make terrible jokes and poke at my image
on a screen and bombs are going off, big Jesus's name!
The whole car is on fire and there might have been a boy
or some one's grandparent in it, but you are too far, too far to
reach or help so you sit back down and your seat is comfortable enough
and you feel just plain tired and slow and weary. Sleep comes soon
and your grandparents stand in a pew next to big sullen Jesus and
their eyes are opaque. They have their legs now.
The sun rises in three days and plants itself, muzzles itself
right into the crux, secure and tight, sweet sleep is mine.
Anthrax, flames, and electrolyte drinks are not so significant
anymore and I am dreaming. I always dream of a house inside
a tornado that is inside of me, and the jet streams tiny flagellum
tailed sea snakes and horses carving in around my veins so fast
nothing can see them but I flop fish-like in a trance to their approval,
bursting through another being like a man through paper and
bombs and car explosions are faint drops in coffee that taste
like the morning and you have a face like a Shakespearean dawn
with no monsters or fathers to harm or protect you and I am here
and we cry a little and laugh at ourselves maybe things can work
and maybe there is justice for our lives and maybe,
there is a silence that keeps a huge landing pad called love.