Blue Fire

My father’s sighs orbit me
He’d call it the graduation of a slave
Wrinkled with stress and perplexity
Swooned and dizzied that i’d adopt a ghost with so much holocaust in its head
Clustered with rusted guilt bronzing its brow
Some dead child of another eating at my womb and all its acres
That i’d squander freedom on these dales and sardine my whole ocean onto a pale peninsula
Like pushing family into a breathless bilge
But a hungry and obscure death is no cleaner
Damned like some village blacksmith
I know there’s no high ground treasured in these peaks
But pastures can feel greener still
A lush dew on my tongue that softens the prickled taste of hate some
To die penniless and alive than centless and dead
And the air carries my skin like less of a stain
I’m a panting steam train, father
God will it that an engine like me keeps on running
Even if off coal and illusion.

They fear us like spiders, father, that if we’re dead they’ll spare us our lives
But i’m too young to quit sleepcrawling up ceilings
Spinning their heads in silk nests of prey
In rooms remorsed with laughter and blood shimmying ovation
Through the assembly hall of hammer & string inside their grandest pianos
I am the one that erodes the wick in jesting glint and sweltering red
Melting their waxyfaced suspense
These aren’t mere blusters of doom, father, but poetry of blues
Blue fire, how i put curley weaver into othello
When i sing these songs on soapbox pulpit through courtyard and chamber
With a mouth full of croft yielding tragic prayer after tragic prayer
Their pews, their applauds, they build altars unto us
That i might perform to escape my stake
And stretch out our name.

I saw ira in a dream once
Long before the blood of marry tormented my mouth like the aftertaste of war
He said it’s not a question of whether we belong here but whether these isles can hold us
And to this day, i stumble across strands of her hair with my tongue
Drunk staggering through the hollow night of my mouth coloured with all this cry
How empty and droughty her follicles were like god pickpocketed a grave then rained grief
His eyes like the back of a head, thick and expressionless
Exclaiming the show is brief but the legacy…long
But her inanimate body has drawn curtains of hair unveiling his bald scalpy celestial words
And now i see how i spent you frivolously on a dream
That you shook yourself dead in disapproval
So i’ll carry this prancing boy of nonsense alone
But how.