II
Darkness, meet the sound of water
I was a rampage, now I calm
Barren from bodily charm
Violet fissions igniting in my mind

I can feel an end coming,
A millennium long surrender
My castles rumble on rolling waters

Darkness, meet the sound of thunder

III

I sit in crossfire in the dead of the night
playing the strings tied to my kin.
Living the sin in choosing to leave

Some exiles turn into bliss
Now I sit in the dark,
in the silence of my destined heartsick
Tell me are they lost or just looking for a leash

They live like kings but keep on saying
how this life is cursed,
they got caught in the falling
They have nine lives and it never seems to end
He is gonna drag your sister down along the way.

I hear he pulled out,
told his mama it was a hole that she called home.
I hear she lost all nine,
became the martyr of a low life.
A beauty queen, she was only too naive
Got thrown to the fire she was born in.

But I see you on the backstreets
Playing hide and seek in a midsummer’s dream
When you were a child,
gazing at the night
Crossing the tracks,
until you ride out

IV
You wake up with baby-blue eyes
Like you saw the rusty lenses of the old world
Where people had rough edges,
less color,
a quiet voice,
and more meaning to them.
Grained and discolored,
Their story is sacred in the blemishes
Your heart is reaching from how far you have drifted.

You see them hazily dancing,
like in a fever dream
shades turning to dust
in dimmed neon lights
ghosts of a past, wieghtless in flight
you watch them dancing in the haze of the night,

Engine sounds cut the dew Of the dawn
You are too young to sleep
tangled up in roadside oleanders
All trying to live a dream

Hoping only for this night to serve
When No one’s betting on the next day
You leave the mirage to walk into a lie
Every day just to feel it:
How they mastered deception
How it is the age of the green bills
How many colors there are in depravity, and,
How smooth crime can be,

Is it them that let you down
Or Was it you who didn’t believe
no one tells you to get out
when you are trying to leave the dream

VI
It’s been 37 hours, no sign of the mountains

We light up a fire and wait for the mist to ease
My old man’s walking the floor like a skeeter
In tune with the big rigs passing down on the Highway
It is a death dance, they are jammed,
like mating crows and there is no turning back

He says slow down your inhale
“There is a pulse in these ridges
thicker than your desire”
I am still a victim of my impatience
We sit and wait under a newborn crescent

He says some thirty years ago
flocks would migrate here all over from Africa
from red cranes to mighty eagles
And on the hills at dusk,
you could hear the laugh of lovers
Watching over them like the holy divine

Now there are no lakes
There are only highways
Marrying his salvaged land to their republic

But there is madness and there is freedom
Where their order ends and these hills begin

VII
It was a wonder to be in the wild
without the pains and naivete of youth

Then I remembered life was
being like a fly stuck in glass,
back-and-forth between the calm
and the longing afterward.
Feeling undone,
when you return from those highlands to a settlement
More of an agreement than a home
To keep you hushed, keep you in line.

VIII
Hello sojourner
You, walking down the freeway
Did you kill a man last night
before riddance took him on his own time
Did you come out of the womb and become a holy judge?

I can tell by the look in your eye
You dream of building a house on hard shells and salt mud
Down the shore on the ramparts
to drink from the debris and float in the cyclone
You don’t cut your flesh
But you feel, every time the tide hits the rocks

Goodbye sojourner,
Are you done with the mountain?
Did you watch a bird of prey as it glides,
and envy the freefall more than the flight?

If I told you I rooted out time
Held it by the horns, knocked it out
A lifetime landlocked, would you go gentle?
On a pinnace, through the gulf.

You would go a sailor,
moored into the chasms below