Gabriel Safdie

after love

the flower's scent outlives
its force in memory
and when reencountered

will conjure strongest
the smell of after love
cleave and then be self releasing

of the sex long after
these hands
these fingers  and

the cock himself
has ceased his strutting
or the crow at dawn

in finnegan's wake

having given up on god now long ago
so that a spade had become a spade with
radiant earth the only ground to live by
he learnt to watch over himself apart
until he drove self-doubt to weariness-
but however tired he was or hard he tried
no sleep would come to him nor any peace

and drawn into some shady twilit place
where all the talk or drugs would fail him
day-dreaming he lost all track of time:
the clock had so timely shed both arms
his watch he'd smashed flat against the bar
now his own time was quickly running out-
a ghost feasting through space on holes

then having resolved to avoid any callers
(so that when the so long longed for came
he'd be set to greet the great intended)
and knowing what would surely be said-
he shunned even his friends with a silence
couched in the same hollow mystery   all
too often pointedly aimed at his ears

only when there seemed nothing left him
but to contemplate himself in thought alone
cooled in the dim male-made womb of the pub
while facing a wall with mirrors for windows
only then could he pick up his stolid mold
bring himself home grope his way into bed
-to awake his face on her eager breast
 

really the blues

it must have been some
imperceptible subtle twist
some brilliantly concealed

malfunctioning within
some microscopic chip
with wires joined askew

some disproportionate solution
failed to crystallize  it must
have been all those   and more

in this   this exquisite machine
of unstilled life in cityscape
this precious breathing

most incredible phenomenon
some call 'my love'  it
might have been just that

virginal

 

yours is the only gloss

among the season's

bareness

 

in the wind

each of the leaves' points

cuts living air

 

   your greenish oily tips

stab sleet and snow

with so much pricking spite

 

as to repel any hand-

when folks

arrange your branches

 

in haloing wreaths

benailed Christ's head

looms ominous

 

chin on chest

a holly thorn crown   prone

to sting the lame devout

 

so piercing vanity

to the quick

  there is no promise

 

in such heartless dire

inflictions   or such deceit

that like your hardy sap is

flash fluorescence

the desert grows without relief
the sands so multiply and spread new gospels
that dunes loom to extend their influence

in shifting humps from coast to coast
thirsting after all such wanton subjects
who would have Earth herself turned into waste

whose sacrifices to a haggled god
yield short term gains at long view losses
  so to this end our heads evangelizing

from greed for lewd compliance  and that
with such success  the being I
a solitary inconvertible amongst us

is deemed a relic-
a jutting jawbone in some western movie
-stuck   amid this flashing videoland

 

here  where even cactus will not grow
except in pots walled-in by fabricated alloys
and framed in windowpanes for light   as

yet another grim reminder of
a sun that once illuminated greener landscapes
viewed from windows looking out on nobler scenes

  then to remember from some history book
how well before the silicones and silicates
back in the teeming city-state of Venice

with commerce then sill only wooing science:
out of the innocence of clearer lungs  their
newfound glass was blown from molten sand

against all odds

​

the floods of hell

molten and blackening

let loose the red

on me first hot

and set to swallow

all that's mine

and isn't   nothing

being so in the end

 

all i put up against

to brave them   given

their being larger

than human life or

death no manmade dam

can stop them   so

unrelenting like

my species itself