When the rains came. And the grass came alive; flooding in its teeming, existence, over concrete.

His death came in
getting out of the
way; skipping over
microcosms to find
successive cliffs
downstairs, pointed
with the dint of death.
Some people would call
it comical or unfortunate.
But it was neither;
rather it is a proclamation
of life;that refuted in its
tipsey-daisy dances and
skips, the invisibility of life.

Boats on Land

Throes of vanity will leap
up to smother a face
in hands. Leaving behind
boats on water beads to
slide down a barely
breathing facade. The
ablution of faces is a
reductive past-time; with
boats losing function and
face losing itself. The
subsequent drying is a
tragic archaelogy of
what was consigned to be
forgotten. Water is a
life-taker in the wrong
hands. It is true. Oceans
in those cradles drown out
faces, leaving behind in wrinkle
contoured valleys (blemished
now by the absence of
memorials) salt rusted
boats moored as the
identifying mausoleums.
Of fishermen and suits.

The Rainy Day Off

In a comic book sprawl
of rain beating down in
smudges on a car,
stereotypes smelted into
a spluttering pool of
lazy incompetence
draining down into
an inconvenient pool.
Two iron-branded
bearded men, looked
across the haze of the
comic world, surprised,
suspicions were left to
brood under raincoats.
Humanistic irony chose not to
intervene for human lives
have a price far too
popularly depreciated.
And so the white smudge
with the grey sprinkling
of smoke interwoven in
the watery translucence,
drove by the spots
suffering from light; as
one villainy replaced another.

Will title later. From atop my tower, I can see satellite dishes cartwheeling down.

Tayyab Ali knew all about human life. But
he could only narrate in
death. How fragile human
frames have been made.
How desperately a heart
beat requires another.
We are all clutching
someone to our chests.
Beneath the creaking
roof that would bury
us. In the debris
that comes from our
failing to understand
that there are others
habiting the same strand
of the universe. In the
debris we have given
up to. Tayyab Ali knew
that the human heart was
the actor without his lines
groping for applause.

Peter Paul Rubens’s Annunciation (detail), ca. 1628

Leonardo da Vinci believed that the cat could hardly be improved on: even the smallest specimen, he said, was a “masterpiece.”

misunderstanding escape

lightening
forking into
the waves of
sand. looks
like it is going
to rain. walking
walking dragged
into the
growing knots
per hour. until
I slipped off the
edge. Of the
world. The
lightening keeps
forking jaggedly
across the sky
pulled by rain-
threatening winds.