For Poetry Month

Poetry Month



the over bloating of words
by institutions on calendars
wielding blades like deranged
warriors in pitched battle
cutting fat from flesh
flesh from bone
crushing bone
into dust
into smoke
into the fire
that burns
as starlight
on a clear night
while crickets make
symphonic thunder
lullabies

like a lunar cycle that lasts
a lifetime that lasts for
a millenium that lasts
for a second that lasts for
an eternal epoch

sisters and brothers swarming
out of the same slimy DNA
untrusting the changes in language
that roll down through centuries
measured on calendars of stone
written in clay and mud or onto
heroic animal hides that lead to
peaceful papyrus or rice paper
stained with ink blood journals
that multiply into the offspring
of gutenburg's reams as it all
portrays the blood and sinew of
human upheavals and desires
with broken bones and hearts
against the backdrop of mathematical
minds gone wild for nuclear soul searching
into the abyss of future desires and madness
gone terribly wrong or right depending on
the hand that hands it out or the
hand that receives its perspective

give me a month and it will all be over
give me a year and you might miss me with a tear
give me a decade and I will write a book of us
give me a lifetime and I might squander it on a month

so give me a night before the gallows, instead
so give me a moment before dying as well
so give me an undying love that you will never forget

I will give you my breaths as I breath them
I will give you my ruptured thoughts of passionate dreams
I will give you our mutually guaranteed extinction

I will die for you in my mind's eye
I will live for you in the dimly lit tenement
of my broken hearted ghetto
I will write to you from my eternal death row
I will leave a flower on the night stand
before I leave you
just before dawn
to fight with the rebels
to build a land with no borders
to build a land with many languages
that all have words and sounds that
cause tears to fall from tired eyes
hearts to be torn from throbbing breasts
minds to implode inward on fantastic journeys
souls to be redeemed for their original values
love to be felt on only an eternal condition
that feels like the forever you have yet to know
or the month of sundays that you have known
many times before
a month of poetry
versus a lifetime
of poems