O Hosanna

A motel beacon breaking over open road:
Broken lights, missing letters, a postcard rack
Speaking to the dead, a medium in cheap gold;
Crystal ball, card table in a gypsy shack

Love lifted the breath and slid a phrase under it

A seeing-eye choir: "look, Hallelujah."

1
I try to keep the policy simple exactly 12.7% of what I see
I then "sing", or "rap."

A strange impluse, to be sure, but I grew up on Blowed tapes
And Bergman flicks
Sub-ducting weeks in a terrent of dollar books and Roxy
Matinees
So it can only make sense that I'm looking for a light
To live between sleep

But no over-black-water-broke search burst, in stale smoke
No swan-necked neon sign hanging burnt in the backbrain
"And if you evanesced in that old overhead spotlight right now?"
There'd be another in my shadow before the next beat hit

I rap in the hush of space for the sake of sucking from
The heavens
One particle of gas at a time, my body's fill, holding out
For one day
When love may lift my breath and slide a phrase under it
O Hosanna

All the while guided by the quiet light strained
Through wings strung in unfinished webs
The light that coils spiders in death, in vain, to resist
The gut-thread of their own suspended forensics

2. "people pass'
W.G. Sebald died in the middle of this song, new novel and all

Like King Dipendra last June in Nepal: crowned in a coma
And gone by morning
And some number of self-shattering Palestinians
Sharded themselves in Jerusalem

A Vietnam veteran hospital team mimes a game with phantom
Limbs;

'cause hit head-on or along in bed, people pass, piece by
Piece

"Some jumping out of buildings, some on their knees in
Prayer."

A string of shopping carts arced
A strip mall headstone, under an overpass
In memory of one who froze a week before
And in the highway swish of a midday rain
Glimmering like the thin bones of stained glass saints

3
"Heaven, I don't know if I've -- whether I'm going to be able to
Preach or not. I never know them things, but uh... this little
Weak man you're looking at, I realize and understand..."

"You're blind, baby, blind from the facts of who you are."

... And who you are in a molecular, American sense
Is a dust-extra in an empire's ruin rehersal
And to cover one's eyes from oneself is inevitable

They still pray for rains on the dry high plains
While I've been chipping my tongue
On the tough shell of his name;

Threaded fingers straining broken breath to a wordless burn
The the bend of a crook of a neck meeting hands, hiding palms

And a blindness falls
Shining out from the daylong unraveling
Of the first light wtitch

The white of the subtitles awash in sunlight
Sucking the date stamp and first words with it
Under the wide lens of a new day

(So can I get a notarized witness?)

I'm twenty-four, still the little brother of a reverend
Writing the bars out, washing them away
Lying flat, floating phrases skyward
And once in a while even falling asleep smiling

But wake up as if spilled out of a mid-day matinee
First eyes clutching for dark;
I take cofee and turn to A-25, the Op-Eds
Where the letters begin:
"Editor -- What short term memories we have."

And the seeing-eye choir's like
"Look, Hallelujah."