Meditation At a Stoplight

MEDITATION AT A STOPLIGHT IN THE RAIN

Empty streets after midnight––

Like the dark blue wings of the bank swallow

Drowned in crimson

& I’m walking slowly nowhere––scornful, laughing

At sleepless cars with tiny breadcrumb mirrors

& Amusement Park shoes scattered like depression

Through the sage gloved Moonlight parade.

Everything is timeless––

Stars flowing within endless rivers of Protests &

Weeping & houses filled with the poor.

The rain––a scorched blue ferris wheel

Typing out carnivals with her fingers

Like red glass clocks with four hands & the alarm

In ourselves passing out of eternity.

As the rain is to sleep,

So the rain agrees to live in the wet-sock silence

Of intersections, halting the endless steps

Of those who already know so much of everything

That approaches with the disordered fury

To live again––

Like a brown spaceship landing in your soul.

The rain will be a lost face in the mist of an hour

As it hovers overhead,

Chanting like an insect in a greenhouse.

Why do I remain

When all I see is the grey October eyes of those

Whom made me feel I was love,

But then I awaken & there’s no one here

1 October 1997

Spoken word version from Unspoken Words.

Text from The Dance Of Yellow Lightning Over The Ridge (Writers & Books Publications).