Pitiful Child (The Scent of Dreams)
audible scent of a dream
belated carrion of lust
adrift in a sea of eyes screaming for light.
I open the gates
with keys I fashioned from the words
you spoke to me in anger. "Pitiful child," you called me
in the language of our people, you thought I'd long since forgotten
and that such curses had atrophied from my tongue.
Turn away from me again, but be quick.
time is our estranged student
We built a banyan tree, atop a rocky mountain
and shouted down laws for the hills to obey.
Maybe we were just children, playing with the dust
pulling out grass from the boredom.
They attest in the meadows, to an inviolate sky
but I've walked down the street to the refinery
In the city where your lover was born,
and can say that there is only a gray window for the sun
If you want to call it Mother Nature, that's fine
but don't come to me when she complains you never come or call.
Once, in a native fable, many yous ago
When we were scholars of two different easts
I told a room full of uninterested friends your story
just so I could laugh to myself at how far your legend would carry
when they spread out across the earth...
a drunken joke, if you will, with a ten year fermentation period
Imagine how long the hangover will be.
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