DEATH IN AUGUST

A coffee man sweating through the steel nets
of the radio, swinging his throat about so rich that
he burning the shingles on my eyes,
he got my eyes swimming like
the frayed fish of Galilee.

Adonai, cryer of the naked cosmos,
the unfurled nudity of swirling universes,
oily and primordial with weeping;
Say, Adonai, my voice is yanked away,
the songs are razors burrowing
into my wailing throats, Adonai,
bawling banshee whisking the nylon veil’s dry fingers
up your milky thigh:
I cry unto thee, Adonai,
only because
no one else seem to got any answers.

A coffee man paints the streets
with a voice so rich.

This wasn’t supposed to be no prayer, Adonai,
but I sold my heart into a doubting thomas’s jewel box;
he sniggered and shut the ivory lid
and they felt so very sharp, those cold velvet innards.
I asked him
Ain’t you believe in Providence,
and he laughed and scampered off
into the granite fields of tombstones,
and when the sun too was slaughtered and fell darkly on the earth,
it felt so fearful
to hold nothing.

The coffee man’s rich throat is sucked away
into the skillfully fading horns,
toombah toombah toombah, rah dee rah,
Adonai, abandoning my moldy eyes
like the bloated blind pale thighs of
you, Adonai.
But you, too, are the rich throat of the coffee man;

don’t leave me weeping.