Beelzebubstomp

Above is Miami on a cloudy Saturday afternoon (photo taken on the Julia Tuttle Causeway @ 70mph), and below is something that was published in A Cappella Zoo (April 2010)

Beelzebubstomp

In rosedusk, when the sky is littered with crows; when all the world's mad and mulish brutalities abound and you've scrapheaped hope and your soul's hiding somewhere in the cracks of your sofa; if your mirror makes rank complaints about the face in it, and you feel like every crumpled lottery ticket in the world, hang your name on a cliché. It's not a question of whichwhat or rightwrong, whywhere or whether the rightbrain seizes what the lefthand knows. The elephant will never shuffle out of the room for you, and wounded is the color of its languor. For this unspooling, precisely not improbable lie, which is life, it's a question of posies and perpetual changelings. Blueruin and a borrowed dialect, the drowsy rings of Lethe. It's not a question of whether or why the ghosts grieve in trees of the evening. The cruel ornaments of Spring; bells, halls, mills, hells, lovers frisking up the peachblue cobblestones of Montmartre. Occidental neopreacher's goatfooted rooftopspeeches warmed with the bluidtinged fruitwine of hate. Nightornoonday, spirits in graveyards coalesce, polliwogs girdlehurtle. Is that a merely man or mostly a noun? It's not a question answerable by the mouth of any cyberterranean quasidemocracy, or that which sells off its own superficial "ideals" as if they were a bundle of flameretardant socks. Simply yes certainly quite commonly understood, the wherefores and the ways the world suffers under the weight of the same old unrealities. Down at the heel and up against the wall, over the hill and under the gun. The lusty living things, lovethighs and paltryprinces, blind matter whirling chaotic. It's not the answer, but the question eternal: when your nightdreams lose their dances, will the djinns still sing for you?