An outside
view of the abundant hovels in the southeastern wilderness of North
America
"Speak!
of a history
that cowers with tragic hesitation
in a sick
thirst for music
to transform
the silent yawning of a near-frozen despair."
On the brink
of waterless hours,
the people
will their fasting into the deep
alone night of
elderly decay.
Before the
horizon
hill dwellers
form their beliefs
by the norms
of a faraway country.
Inside their
habitations
a strong light
pulls warped wooden walls
and shrill
metallic roofs
into sporadic
gusts
Winds brew
utter derangement
before the awe
of a clear restitution.
“Glumlob”
covered with
light-gray hair
stands just
below four feet
wears a
beardless face
deformed by
wrinkle lines
deep and
obscured
with the
weather of age.
“Xeres”
political
leader of rebel movement
endures
violence
and
assassination plots
“St. Nein”
rural scholar
independent
free-thinker
lives in
extreme poverty
socially
segregated for unkempt religious beliefs
and musical
talent
“Burro”
foreign worker
operates in
mundane existence
of banal
repetition
and
uninspiring media
Outside of a
Bavarian-modeled tavern
among the
spruce and hillock pastures of grain
lies the seedy
aftermath of an impassible addiction.
A disease
symptomatic of itching
and wanderlust
can be smelled in the air
pungent as
dung-heaped flats.
A nameless
affliction hovers
there, a
garrulous drunken wave of boredom and displeasure
among local
tradesmen and salespeople.
The four
characters appear outside
at the
street’s edge
dumbfounded
under their trenchant guise
a creeping
fear follows them into the dry, cold hours
only moments
before the dawn of twilight.
First calls
from birds of prey pierce
an unnerving
silence.
Glumlob sits
down
carelessly on
a stool
bent with
age
“Who has
risen?”
Xeres
“The ghouls of
sleep,
thickening in
the atmospheric pull of a drifter
sunk in unborn
misery.”
St. Nein
reading silently
from a
withered sheet of paper,
speaks softly
to himself
between
lung-gaping drags of burly smoke
“Why follow
the thirsting martyrs
bellowing
unbroken curses on foreign tides
drowning the
earth in a rage
forlorn and
dry
as the terse
dismay of a few weary soldiers?”
Xeres
“We are at the
core of the tame
yet a sickened
border cult
sounds off conspiring
larks in the unmarked wilderness
bled to the
rinds of our acid relation with the filth of Her horrific cries
She fades
passive in the rustic flesh of a moody and wiry plan
unmentioned in
the morbid treatises of her ancient sacrifice
To a god’s awful
pain…
Her smoke
still blows.”
Glumlob
“I am not a
curse.
Nor speak in
chants from the fluidity of a light and youthful heart
yet I feel how
the temptress fills the seeds of experience with earth’s blush-filtered fires
She speaks
‘empty your
soft tragedy in my arms
and I will
test your heart through the flood
of
innumerable, untold swaying masteries
over the eye
of a single slave.’”
Burro
“Not a slave,
a voluntary
throat to enable the passage of gold
a joke to lure
the strange into the motion of a boundless, silent world
a moat to
challenge the mind with work
and frame the
body with cruel consternation.”
Xeres
“She is Earth.
And her lark
is a native to no single land
…to all land.
Who flies with
an intake of breath
that shudders,
inspired by the majesty of all creation.”
Burro
“A placeless
following of brutish pornography!
Now, a land
smoldering
with a
sameness all too deaf to free even the slightest sound from its ashen praise
and crackling
in the laughter of a muck that resounds
with the sharp
flits of a songbird’s talon
etched into
the browned womb of singularity
We croon at
the false violence of livid lands.”
St. Nein
between righteous pauses
that sneak
around a pedestal
of past
experience
“Hmmm….”
Silence.
He returns
inside.
December
25, 2009
Somewhere
in Alabama
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