Waving to Normal
 
 

Now friends speak more cordially to one another
in tones more consciously yielding, tender, and after

near-nova light of disaster witnessed,
have to call on more than good times past

to carry them through the pitiful, powerful undying
hum inside of hovels…sounding

so whispered, subdued, few perceive
as lament.  There’s so much we’ll have

to catch up on that laughter has not
demolished yet.

                            Had enough
Apocalypse for one day?  Is the fiery stuff

sucked through open-air infernos flesh-
infused enough?  Is the powdery ash-

swarm chirping cicadic distress-calls
from lost firemens’ locator signals,

eerie enough?  Surprised as a stroke victim,
face pressed against the shower-stall, taking in

a waterdrop’s
globe as it stops

on a tile, then down last
minute changes of mind before it’s closed

again.  Like when fatigue smears
raw crude in mental gears

before its own
endorphins, in slow-motion,

bloom; the way
a drug knows

where it’s needed.  A stillness tells you
you're in the zone, cinched.  Who

needs movies?  If we wanted to choose
terror, mayhem, mass destruction, we’d watch the news.

And what about the urgency in moments of happiness
on this side; don’t they clinch the hunch there is

no other side; that only here
are the words for whose sake we hear

at all?  Too heavy to lug around
language if you don’t mean it.  Too strained

to call it "peace" when the times travel
on pathways unimaginable.

Even in the garden, enchanted, at sundown,
each leaf’s etched fractal black on

pale blue only the sky contains, warbler
alternates with chainsaw, running water

with plosives.  Before it ignites, the unthinkable
is news just waiting to be scooped.  While

old men are running the world
into the ground they’ll soon enter,

their sacrificial song, blown
into our heads, is so decked in tones

of sanctity, you feel
like you’ve just been blessed.  Soon as you tell,

between breaths, of another loved ones’
death upon the recent rest, is as soon

as you know how, for everyone, wounds --
though different -- mean the same.  Home-

coming is in having a share and knowing,
though late, that you share in the suffering that brings

things to a crawl.
The personal

show is over;
the further

cost of having the dark knowledge now
that ash and afterglow stare through

the charred  lids of "the actual."
Given clay for mouths, we call

on the unspoken through incantation.
Poised motion,  sustained duration.

Voice continually falling
back into the throat, drying up, calling,

fossil-layered, practically extinct, within
something the eye had seen again

and again, something swept aside as a bird
plying a great hunger sweeps aside

fixed form to harrow
pregnant skies tomorrow.

Today will be long ago
when the monuments arrive that are on the way.