Aubade

An aubade is a poem written to a lover, parting at dawn. This is something slightly other than that. Why it is about laundry I don't know, it just is.

Source: Michael Gäbler, wikicommons

Aubade

in the first rays of sunrise
the first words you say cannot be a lie
every new pair of lovers knows this
i once knew this, i think

this is the reason, she says,
you cannot let the laundry hang
overnight on the line, lest this blessing
dry with the dew into each sleeve,

wind among the sheets, and twist
each conversation to the one thing
you cannot let the other know
that you believe to be true

oh really, I say laughing, what
between us would that one thing be
and to the look she gave all other words
fell in shadow to the floor

Black Flag, 1981

Henry Rollins, ca. 1981. Source: http://blogs.indiewire.com/twhalliii/previewing_park_city

what is more punk rock than

passing out with only the offgassing

of the dozen sweaty strangers closest

to breathe and only their bodies

holding you up from the broken glass

blooming across the beer stuck floor

that carry you a plastic bag in the tide

until a shove sends you falling awake

into the air impossibly still moving outside

the mosh pit and stumbling in the vastness

of the noise until you realize it is

your own scream and that it is utter joy

The Night Market

Reworked. Maybe it's better. Who knows.

The Night Market

Because the night is broken and leaking
Starlight through the bedroom walls,
I will let my feet grow cold and colder
To find who knows to find me here.

It’s better to be awake when the dead
Come to lie across your legs.
It’s better to have your eyes open
When the stars begin to sing.

For then the strangeness can be yours
Even as the ghosts are not,
Are the children or ancestors of others,
Who rise when you rise, beckoning

To take you by the hand and fly
As you fly in dreams, to the night market.

There are crowds there, faces lit
And shadowed by charcoal fires
Spitting kebabs tended by toothless men,
Crowds that do not press but give way.

A brush from your arm, a basin of pearls
Spills out across the ground.
You cannot pick one but all the others
Must follow in a glistening strand.

What is taken is the means to explain.
What is left is the chance to breathe again.
At any moment after –midday sitting
On a park bench, say – the stars can find you,

Reach down through dappled sky, and push.
If you fall now you will keep on falling –
Who may catch you?  For to live
Is to be left, is to know there are burdens

No one can be free of and still be alive,
To know we would gladly have chosen
That burden were we but given the chance.
But choice itself is what life denies.