The day you left i became a writer
The day you broke it off is the day I became a fighter,

I can't believe that even after all this time I still want you back,
The days seem longer and the nights so much colder,

I look at myself and then I look at her
"Was I ever beautiful to you?" or was it all a lie
All my thoughts and dreams died

So many memories of the past, so many promises that never did last,
I used to know you or so I thought I did

I pass a room regularly where no one lives
it sparks and crackles
with some old record player
and a Nazi urn not a bit dusty

The records play the burning of jazz
somewhere in Union Square
because brownshirts don't really rest
and the Snake Handler's oil dims rarely

Oh! Someone
Someone somewhere
awaits for me
behind the pillar of time
stands someone
some where
Who
we all don't know
but some one
some where
we all know
awaits for us
but who and when
none will know
this alone is the secret of life
we all know
some one
somewhere waits for me
who knows

If you are the one
waiting for me
come over will thee early

Singers don’t ask why they sing,
Nor painters doubt their coloring;
Dancers don’t complain of pain,
Composers do not hide in shame.
So why do we commiserate?
O, the suffering we endure
To craft a poem that is pure!
How lonely is our chosen path,
Tormented souls who swoon with wrath!
But nobody cares how we take to flight,
So just shut the fuck up, and write.

Translated from the Portugese
or Mario De Sa Carneiro

Silence in me, in myself.
Silence in my sister’s house,

she is a beautiful madwoman to dream of…
It would be a mistake to look
in a mirror, to lay down my life..
My sister is a beautiful madwoman
to dream of in her lost house.
Unless a miracle happens, it would

be a mistake to look in a mirror.

In the next two weeks I lay down my life
for the suns and the fields and the mad
scream my sister razes above the sun.

Scramble,
unscramble
fill in the blanks

Decode
the abstract
essence of life

Truly
life is a
jigsaw puzzle

We are a minority too
We too have our gripe
We are part of the stew
Due empathy not ripe

Path to nation's unity
Atop base of diversity
Oppressed by density
Needs patient civility

Way out of this mess
For selective ingress
Of the skewed process
Is same equal access

I've always loved and just unconsciously memorized this poem by priest/activist Father Daniel Berrigan.

"Some"

("to the Plowshares 8, with love")

by Daniel Berrigan

Some stood up once, and sat down.
Some walked a mile, and walked away.

Some stood up twice, then sat down.
“It’s too much,” they cried.
Some walked two miles, then walked away.
“I’ve had it,” they cried,

Some stood and stood and stood.
They were taken for fools,
they were taken for being taken in.

Shopping for produce at the local store,
potatoes, tomatoes and onions galore.
And in my haste, I bent at my waist,
as my cellphone fell from my shirt, into the mushrooms and the dirt,
It rang "Bad to the Bone", my cellphone tone.
I answered and the world stood still,
a presence leering, a yearning to fill.
A greeting of love, it came from above,
a voice "Matthew, God calling". I felt like falling
I caught myself on the rhutaga bin, thinking "oh, no did I sin?"

I pad, stridingly down the street,
powerful, invulnerable,
one hundred and fifty centimeters
of indomitability

A man yells from a car
“sit on my face”
I riposte
“so your nose is bigger than your dick”

His three friends emerge
Scary, yes,
an unbroken stare
and a blade in my hand

They leave.
gangs rapists are closet fags,
they want their dicks where their mates ones were.

Not all of us can fight like I can,
I learned never ever to be harmed
that way ever ever again.