GODDESS COME

I feel spiders on my spine

and I don't cringe.

I take the Goddess when she's open

and I binge.  Her aim is stretched

between what's been

and what will be.

I leave the greater part with Her

and take a little bit back just for me.

Stain me with your greatness,

O creation.  Slay my willing spirit

with the holiness of heights,

take me to where rocks

have formed a cave,

let me paint with berries

juiced as dark as tattoo ink.

Show me the sacred

architecture without end

slithering beyond the brink.

Let my tongue of inspiration

moisten your sweetest stink

let my blood think.

MOON.

Eroded disc, eroded orb,

your cloak is thin,

you suffer from exposure.

Still I sense some spectral

fertility in you.

Is it your tow-line in the blood,

your cleansing rinse that

brings us back to the womb fresh?

I would bring you my end,

waft across your body

with clownish footsteps,

let me spring lightly one last time

when my bones are old.

When I'm tired and the air tanks

are running out

like an old electric record

whose source is far

I will remove my mask

and let you undo these lines

unfold these creases

unravel me far out

into many worlds.

NAT TURNER

Originators strike deep.

Inspiration comes in a flood,

cutting down the DNA

of the oppressor.

Violence like a storm

within a storm, fresh

from the cosmos.

A bright Black man of God

had the will, the sacred audacity

in deed.  Articulate in prison,

versed from before his birth

in glorious destiny, wreathed

in grateful angels

from pinioned beginnings

to the full flower of revolution.

Blessed with the lucidity of courage,

seeing from the fields

a vast expanse of stars

that must give light.

Not one is white.

ALPHA'S ALPHA*

Roosters can fly in spirit.

I always knew you had a soul.

Your speckled wings

are spreading now,

your red and gold

filaments trailing

over country roads

and ignoring highways.

Who's that ghost raccoon

following you?  The eye

you took from him

is filled with liquid moonlight,

I can see he is your brother now.

He collapsed in the forest

with a missing testicle.

You roam these astral lands

together toward your own

unknown Valhalla.

Then I wake from lucid dream

and release you to rejoin you

sometime later

in another unsought vision.

* The title was inspired in part by Rafael Alberti's 'The Angel Angel' from his great collection, Concerning the Angels.  That book and The Owl's Insomnia are favorites of mine.  Alberti was one of the greatest poets who ever lived, and his work should be confronted by anyone with a serious interest in poetry.

A glade beside a cliff-drop

a pool of bejeweled women

a burlap umbrella,

corolla'd skull and bones

sweet rain soaking fibers

and the laughter shaking

delicious rows of breasts

bright triangles of sentient pubis.

Faces staring tendrils

through the bleakness

of my former soul

searching me for

milks of ancient dawn

no king's hand

on no willing pawn

free people in a ring

of stone and water

we frolicked making sons and daughters.

ESTUARY OF ASH

Estuary of ash

the hissing kiss of fallen particles

flowing together from formerly

living bodies, wet with blood again

from heaped neglected generations,

filling my ash-stained hands,

mouth crying from my forehead

for my long lost people,

teeth and spine adjoined

in a crawling thing

that can no longer sing.

The flow of deaths

around strong rooted trunks

and trunk-thick roots,

leaves of scalp and hair

landing on reconstituted skull,

making me climb out and

reclaim my throat of throats,

building up the scream of life

lost to so many.

I see my mixed ancestors

pressing a wall of glass that

presents like a bulldozer's blade,

and I want life from shade

beneath disintegration,

let it divide my cells

into teeming darkness,

darkness which has kept the life

unseen in gemlike rectitude

the pale blind sand flows past

the clinging sash of inheritance

to catacombs of damned

whose singing no door has slammed

an unstuck tongue has wrapped

my heart and taken its errant seed

to deeper wombs of home

whose rowers never row alone.

ATTACK OF THE SWAMPMAIDS

Part Two

Swampmaids invade offices

through water and waste,

protected by their amphibious bodies,

shaking off the human sewage with a snarl

as they embark into the cubicles,

injecting psychedelic slime

into corporate computers,

erasing all government files,

poisoning the hearts of heads of state

and sealing their genitals.

Black swampmaids shake fin-clad booty

in ranks atop long conference tables,

dripping radical literature into broken brains,

hypnotizing bosses to walk through

broken windows and smash their skulls

between the painted lines of parking lots.

A few awaken to their torment

and begin to dance along.  They kiss

the foot-fins of the swampmaids

and their veins light up

with swamp psilocybin.

How they long to dissolve

their false identities

in living water.

Now we march together to the swamps

to be fully baptized.  The converts

see the smile on my face: my gills

are beginning to open.

Each opening presents a purple pussy

on my skin.  This is the realm

that dwells in me, not just

the realm that I am dwelling in.