Lingering beams of the last winter day
melt snowflakes on the way to my palm.
Clouds align in the mountain sky
Darkening waters reflect mother-of-pearl calm.

Following sheen of the serpentine rail,
climbing and rumbling for miles the train
cuts through the silence of highland terrain,
flooded by shimmering night.

Breathing and trembling in every dry stem,
throbbing in every awakening root,
screeching through me, the night makes
me sing the atonal, arrhythmical song.

Though animals hide from moon’s bright light,
and the breeze is only gentle
the way the frogs cry with wind chimes
the leaves in the trees moan
and the ring around the moon reddens
I know the poet could not rightly
call this night still

it seems so far apart from the adjacent world of man
but the yellow light of florescent bulbs
is the jaundice of my eyes
and from them I see
fey and imp alike
in the mosquito hawk
who is up late
perplexed as I am
by the fossicking
incongruence

Yes, yes I belong to a race
homo sapiens I'm by birth
alienated in disgrace
being not considered worth

I was nursed in liquid white
by a mother who praises the Lord
wishing to hold even those in His light
for whom there's no black God

Even scars on white skin are black
blood is red no matter color class or creed
yet the stigma of being black bleeds
from deep seated wounds hard to heal

I saw the plains of a primal nation
O what my eyes have seen!
The herds in their millions,
Their long migrations
Deep in their memory.

O let roam the spirit in the wind,
There was a day I lived in freedom!

Where glows the wide amazing sky,
Mira light, the stars of the southern cross;
Below the hungry lion’s roar
Their deep mourning sighs.

O what my eyes have seen,
There was a day I lived in freedom!

A touch of white on the red dirt -
the last snow - a page lost
from a diary written
by a careless hand on the day
when wind was stronger than words.

Winter knows her lines.
Three-finger footprints,
tink-tonk of the branches,
black seeds on the snow,
squirrels and crows are her poems.

She writes and leaves them to melt
on steaming slopes of the days,
when warbler is singing
and rocking the branches
in drunken fox-trot.

At the time you didn’t know it,
But you were a liar.
And I loved you.

Lifting me into the air
As if I were an angel.
Swaddling me
In your promise of forever,

That you didn’t realize
Was already broken.

Late nights awake
Spent listening to the sound
Of my sobbing heart
In a duet with soft hums
Of sadness.

Waiting for a sign.

Women only know for sure
Men make
make art
make empires
make monuments
or seduce
or rape

or quietly accept our own ends

Sometimes at night when sleep won't come
and eyes burn red from lack of rest
in small hours I almost feel numb
as heart beats tired in my old chest.

Is it imagination that I see,
this chair, these walls, even this pen,
all of what's surrounding me
and things to which I must attend?

Or, perhaps it being night
all of this is just a dream
which will end at dawn's first light
when the fogs rise up like steam.

It was late in history
the cities had flourished,
grown into bound structures.

Bounded by the reflective walls.
My England had shrunk
Into blobs of black
Surrounded by tilled land

The realm of machines
The out lands of growth
Machine controlled
Then control from the city

Operators playing games
A game called survival
Between each city a link
The new inter city way

Compartmented travel
London to Manchester
City linked to city
Spaces of beauty kept