CROSSROADS
Sun goin' down,
Dark don't catch me here!
Robert Johnson
Crossroad Blues
Night is a riddle
hidden within the magician's dark sleeve.
Consider the vagaries of stars,
how they tinkle like the tiny bells
on a jester's velvet cap.
Consider your future
crowded with saints and lunatics.
Consider lying awake all night
to face the funhouse mirror.
where you have only yourself,
and yourself and yourself,
how the window slides away,
becomes a floating tomb,
where suicides hang like smoke.
What you cannot see
is a sky wrought with messages,
as an intaglio on the palms.
On some dead-end street,
graves have been emptied.
The moon lets go of her stem,
turns into a ship of bones.
10/31/96
This is the night dusty souls
languish in their sewers,
watched over by granite lambs.
It is the night saints wear kilted skirts
spattered with coffin dirt, when skull-faced children
carry lanterns of skinned and grinning heads.
This is the night trees release
leaves of red witchery, when angels
in flimsy gowns ride their discs.
Tonight is the night a dark wood swoons
around us like the rings of Saturn, when death
beautifully polishes things, leaves them there.
It is the night blackness
drives away the indigo light
and slaps us back inside our caves.
Tonight is the night I can nail a board
over the face of anyone
I have ever loved.
