and then a day passes
and you still don’t have a doctor
and you’ve got
cancer
and you’re 37
and you still don’t have a doctor
Jamal by Kika Dorsey
The camel is at the top of my tree,
but he cannot climb to the silver star.
We ride on his humps
to mummies also bound to the earth
and pyramids of mud and brick.
And now there are green walls,
babies fall out of me,
mountains crush the horizon,
and the coyotes stalk our cats.
I watch my feet, how they tread on graves,
and my hands weave blankets before the sun can rise,
blankets with the constellation of Libra,
with its binary and double stars,
claws of the scorpion and scales,
its home built on air.
She can wear anything she
wants now, jeans, a t-shirt, a backwards baseball cap, a
food-splattered muumuu, or even nothing at all.
Nobody’s left to see her do her work, tugging
stubborn teeth free from blast-cleaned skulls
with a rusty set of pliers, a
string tied to an anvil, an old claw hammer.
He seemed to know
everything and nothing, as if space-time
ran right through him and he merely channeled
its Tao. He could feel the rhythm, the rhyme
of all things, understood the untrammeled
Force in all its power.
“Try it now,” you growl, and the engine
roars to life, your great, dirty-blond mane
shaking with satisfaction.
He mistakes idle trash for exotic birds
w/ names he can’t pronounce,
the sound of kid fights
w/ old arguments between
adopted parental figures. He lives
in a model house of blind luck, sensitivity
training & a heightened 6th sense
whose presence is attributed to hearing loss
& basic stubbornness.
it’s a series of rounds,
a duck & cover
pecking order
any Ayn Rand fanatic
can see the appeal here.
"I used to be a boxer," my grandfather said
and you could see the tinge of pride
as the words came out of his mouth.
you could see he had been transported
back to some earlier day
when he had the physical strength
and the stamina
to go toe to toe with any fool who would dare.
To save the galaxy is no big deal,
but to save it twice is much more than luck.