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Salvatore Ala, 24 april 2015
Strip Search
for Victor Hernández Cruz
Strip search because I was full of the drug love,
Strip search because my name is an eye-rhyme with Allah,
Strip search because of Mafia stereotypes,
Strip search because I was carpooling to Mexican Village,
Strip search because I carried a book of poetry,
Strip search because I was traveling to New Orleans,
Strip search because I loved a woman with two names,
Strip search because a black woman offered me a ride,
Strip search for desiring Belle Isle after midnight,
Strip search because I am not a savior but a Salvatore,
Strip search for bleeding from hands and feet,
Strip search for driving naked and saving time,
Strip search for visiting the graves of my ancestors,
Strip search for the orange blossoms on my bride,
Strip search for the smoke of ablution and peace,
Strip search for defiance at the borders of freedom.
Salvatore Ala, 24 april 2015
Pathetic Fallacy
The most noxious landfill is language.
Books are polluted; libraries, dump sites.
Due to toxic levels of pathetic fallacy
Bookstores recall infected books;
Greenpeace intervenes poetry readings;
Poets are fined for offshore word spills.
Why must a cloud be forever lonely?
Why must the sea be always cruel?
Books burn by their own hands.
Lexicon’s toxic waste contaminates
Our graves and poisons our shadows
From which we rise to stain the world.
Salvatore Ala, 17 april 2015
Natural History
We are bone, love, we are earth,
Our breathing slows and we are stone.
We are flesh, love, we are spirit,
Our eyes close and we are mineral.
We are burial places, love, we are fire,
When we kiss the ice ages recede.
We are half lives, love, missing links,
When we touch the earth grows fecund.
Salvatore Ala, 11 april 2015
The Study of Languages
My love is like the crescent moons of Arab calligraphy,
Like a language that sand erases.
She is also like the little word houses of China
Shining on their bamboo stilts
As the green rice flashes to the east.
Spanish is for the blood rose of her mouth,
French for the azure of her gaze,
Russian for her madness and passion.
Latin is for the mirror of her beauty.
Ancient Greek is our Olympus,
Our long climb to a mythical sublime.
If I spoke Aramaic I could tell you
Of the myrrh and frankincense of her flesh.
Sanskrit is for the mystic knowledge of her eyes,
Hieroglyphs are for the silence
With which she guides me to her living tomb.
She is like the inscription on a stone,
More obscure as it is revealed.
Salvatore Ala, 8 april 2015
Animal Horns
for Kenya
The cries of hyenas are human cries
The teeth of the lion are human
Jaws of crocodiles are human jaws
Our blood changes into venom
We destroy our own young
We hunt the young of others
We smell slaughter on the wind
Why then consider ourselves separate
If we walk in animal footprints
Why number our tribes
If migrations end in murder
Why give a name to creation
If the same wild God destroys it
Salvatore Ala, 21 march 2015
Anthology
Flower of kisses
Luminous arc between lovers
Flower of God
Withering when I grasp it
Flower of blood
Coagulates violence
Flower of peace
Elsewhere a weed
Flower of starlight
In clusters
Flower of time
Blossoming space
Salvatore Ala, 20 march 2015
Unforeseen Events
All at once nature was old;
It touched the roots of gold--
And darkness, made of light,
Cast a shadow vast as night.
Soldiers wouldn’t fight.
Drones got lost in flight.
Artists grew so cold
Marble left them unconsoled.
All at once we saw
In each a universal flaw:
Earth was a child
Born to be reviled.
Believers couldn’t believe,
Mourners wouldn’t grieve.
Warmongers went to hell
For the sin of living well.
Politicians couldn’t lie.
Polluters wouldn’t try.
Everything went opposite
The direction of profit.
All at once the earth died;
Civilization,left untried--
And darkness, made of night,
Cast a shadow vast as light.
Salvatore Ala, 16 march 2015
Empire Coins
From desperation repossessed,
From marriages divorced in debt,
From suicides in garnishment,
One coin of empire in demise.
From families in ruin,
From homes that were lost,
From hope appropriated,
One coin of empire in demise.
From mask of Mammon,
From fear and war,
Just such interest is accrued,
One coin of empire in demise.
Salvatore Ala, 14 march 2015
Mother Son Song
Tell me a story mother
All the hospital windows
Are black with snow
Tell me a story mother
Nurses are gathering fire
Doctors are measuring wire
Tell me a story mother
When does our care
For what is ours wear
Tell me a story mother
What we lose in time
We receive in kind
Tell me a story mother
Memory is a medicine
Exceeding what has been
Tell me a story mother
Soil is buried in soil
And grief in toil
Tell me a story woman
Death is the meaning
Of mother in my flesh
Tell me a story mother
The sick are waking
It is night and it is morning
Salvatore Ala, 9 march 2015
Terrace Garden, Lampedusa House
Tigris or Babylon or well-watered Eden,
Flowers tumbled over balustrades,
Leopard lilies sprang to the pads of their feet,
Hibiscus blossoms flared in damp sea air,
Miniature lemons orbit a space
In perception for the beauty of the singular
And the shadows of a brightening dusk.
From this terrace you can study the stars,
You can contemplate a meaning
In the shifting mirror of night’s tides.
The conjunction of the constellations
Culminates in a double star of vision:
Everything that changes stays the same—
The flower of the heavens has but one eye.
Salvatore Ala, 20 december 2014
Firebird Sunset
That’s the Phoenix! That’s the myth!
That’s what the storybooks
Have been trying to tell me. The firebird
Nests in the searing winds of time.
It migrates to the forests of the sun.
It lives in the drop of fire behind the eyes
And perches on the volcano in the ribs.
You’ll know the firebird by its ashes,
By how the sunset beats its wings
And flames out like a cosmic fire.
Better to start living, to start loving,
Better to be consumed with joy
Than live another day without rebirth,
Without music that catches fire
Or words that cast a burning shadow.
Salvatore Ala, 18 december 2014
In a Gallery of Birds
The mind is brushed by sparrow wings.
Hart Crane
All shadows of a kind cross the atlas of the mind.
Alone or with fledglings in realistic settings
The ghosts of those birds migrated into words.
The longer we stayed the sound of a glade.
Windows doubled as skies for eternity in their eyes.
Even for a feather it is a heavy tether.
In each nest eggs at rest.
Such stillness grows like flight in repose
Mounted there in flying air.
What is seeming if nature is dreaming?
What is death to a hummingbird’s breath?
In an eagle’s gaze soar endless days.
A glass case sings it breaks with wings.
All field marks fade light goes into shade.
Salvatore Ala, 9 december 2014
The Counterweight
If you weigh the stars in the balance
Glaciers are nurseries of the stars.
They are weighbridges to the borealis,
Ice roads into isolated communities.
They’re hydroelectric power plants,
Evolutionary clocks, mammoth museums,
Icebox mountains of organic matter.
Meltwaters surge from the summits
Enlivening salmon in summer streams,
Nourishing the valley with snowmelt.
Glaciers are a kind of counterweight
To their own absence tipping the scale.
Once gone, what could replace glaciers
That we’d not burn in water/drown in fire.
Salvatore Ala, 9 december 2014
Journey of Life
You want balance, but this abandoned bicycle
In Amsterdam borders on paralysis.
It is Chaplin pretending to be the Fuhrer.
It is whoever survives, whoever escapes…
It is a flower cart that flowers in the same spot.
It is modern art, the unraveling of modes,
Picasso’s “Bull’s Head” reconstituted,
A bicycle trellis in European horticulture,
An instrument for the music of rarest days.
Someone left this bicycle and didn’t return.
Someone locked this bicycle here and died,
Or moved, or moved away and died,
Or became a novelist, like Michel Houellebecq.
It’s a sacrificial lamb, a contract with loopholes,
A love letter from the bicycle crazes.
The wheels of the sky ripen among vines.
The pedals are powered by the sun,
And with wind, deep-rooted to the spot,
The lock is slowly unlocking, like space.
Salvatore Ala, 9 december 2014
Conversations with Men with Brain Injuries
You who reason and speak
Speak for us who have no names and no names.
You who come and go
Walk among wheelchairs in random space.
You who are alone
Open these doors to see who is alone and alone.
You who are lost
Find yourself among the lost who are lost.
You who are jealous
Look at what men owning nothing own.
You who hate
Imagine hatred when temperament is all tenderness.
You who are in pain
Ponder this painless abstraction.
You who have God
Consider a God of global amnesia.
You who are searching
Exit the mind and it is still mind and you are saved.
Salvatore Ala, 9 december 2014
Music Mountain
for Alan Blind Owl Wilson
I’m going up to music mountain
Where all my friends have gone,
Where the air is pine-scented
And you’re high all the time.
They say the mountain is tuneful,
You can hear the fire of the sun,
And at night the humming stars
And beyond them, God’s blues harp.
Salvatore Ala, 9 december 2014
Chronicles of Man
After the first beheading, hope was severed like a limb.
After the second, love produced a fountain of blood.
After the third, faith changed faces with fear.
After the fifth, knowledge bled to the last drop.
After eight beheadings, God recoiled.
After fifteen, there was no more happiness.
After twenty, it all seemed propaganda.
After thirty-four, more headless people took office.
After fifty-five, a collective body was sworn in.
After ninety-nine, children played with human heads.
After two hundred, there were no more days of peace.
After four hundred, it was hell on earth.
After six hundred, the executioners were put to death.
After a thousand beheadings, they dare not stop.
After fifteen hundred, fate and freedom were indivisible.
After twenty-five hundred, the heads kept singing.
After five thousand, a dialogue began.
After seven, the heads became oracles.
After ten thousand, there were more priests than people.
After fifteen, the books were sealed.
After twenty thousand, it was a total human eclipse...
Salvatore Ala, 6 february 2014
What Angels Know
A handicapped child is born to test us,
He’ll see if we are worthy of his attention.
The sick hold out their medicine for us to take—
It is good for the soul, they say.
The homeless guide us home unaware.
The hungry feed us with their eyes.
The suffering save us with their heavy tears.
When we are tired of being frivolous
We sometimes look differently at people and at things,
And they look at us and say
Even you are greater than you know.
Salvatore Ala, 20 september 2013
Clouds Over London
... neither God nor No-God
Louis MacNeice
Not clouds but burkas naked on clotheslines,
Hawksmoor gloom with Horus eye,
Warzone Luftwaffe left-over thunder,
Lions’ heads on building tops,
Quorum of the heavens… London fog
And a neighborhood in London fog,
The ghost of Hitchcock at the window
Of his house gave the shadow of a doubt.
Nothing was real, not buildings or streets.
Only a waking sleep from cab to cab
And a destination from which you depart.
Not clouds but statues wet in flesh
And veil, as in “The Winter’s Tale,”
Or the dead likeness of a changing guard.
North of the city an explosion; south, a beheading.
Astride the block a shadow slumps.
The head of God, a cloud in a basket.
Salvatore Ala, 12 september 2013
Stonehenge Revisited
The earth is cradled in a grave
The sky is buried in the earth
The stones are hanging from a thread of light
And everyone here has been here before
And everyone has come a long way
And those who love meet those who hate
And those who breathe air breathe stone
And those who are fire are dust
And those who are clay shall be wine
And those who arrive meet those departing
And children find their mothers
And fathers reconcile with sons
And the old meet themselves in the young
And the young discover a road
And round the heavenly clock time is as nothing
And we cluster for warmth
At the brief fire of a thousand years
Salvatore Ala, 5 september 2013
Six Rooms
The first is my window blinds.
Slats with pull cords
Between light and dark.
The second is my carpet.
A magic carpet of wine tracks
Notated by cannabis tacks.
The third is the cigarette tin
In which I keep my addiction
To loose change and nicotine.
Fourth, a few fossils
I found on a beach
In primeval childhood.
Next to last my old pool cue.
I play impossible shots
On imaginary tables.
Finally, a faded photograph
In inexpensive frame
Of someone loved and lost.
Salvatore Ala, 29 august 2013
Kintsukuroi
When everything is repaired with gold leaf
Good will shines brighter through our blood
Like a poem with golden seams or a living art.
So your favorite bowl shattered like the world,
Its pieces are still a bowl.
It could also be a more beautiful world.
Salvatore Ala, 10 july 2013
A Time of Hard Rain
In so much rain the homeless drown,
If this rain was bullets they’d be children of massacres.
If this rain was petroleum coke we’d already be Pompeii.
If this rain was a pesticide we’d be innumerable bees
Found dead in parking lots round the world.
If this rain was plague we’d be shadows among Pharaohs.
If this rain was money we’d drink from the same well.
If this rain was food the hungry could eat their tears.
If this rain was love, hatred would dissipate like haze.
If this rain was peace, peace would water our lands.
If this rain was rage, God would haemorrhage
From a wound at least as mortal as our own.
Salvatore Ala, 5 july 2013
Incantation Bowl
This is a poem that fills
The emptiness of a bowl.
This is also a poem
That empties the fullness of the bowl.
This is a poem.
Salvatore Ala, 5 july 2013
America
In your own words
You can take the road not chosen
And arrive at the idea of order at Key West,
Or gather at the river
Where the branch will not break.
What lips my lips have kissed
Are words for the wind.
This is just to say, America,
I carry you in my heart
Like a dream deferred.
Salvatore Ala, 24 june 2013
Petroleum Coke Piles on the Detroit River
I went to Ambassador Park,
What an eyesore that petroleum coke.
If Zug Island wasn’t displeasing
With its Windsor boom and toxic look,
Now they let petroleum peddlers
Dump their junk on the downtown river.
This is what they think of people.
This is what they think of the earth.
When did that neighborhood
Become an industrial site? First the riots
Then recession and the crash.
Didn’t anyone pick anyone else up?
If Detroit is hell on wheels
With incinerator and coke piles
It’s hell in sky and water.
Tankers load up with thermo-crack,
A cloud in the river spreads
Like an oil slick big as the cloud.
West of us sundown is ablaze,
That’s the sunset of a non-earth.
Salvatore Ala, 20 june 2013
State of Grace Hospital
Saw Grace Hospital operated on yesterday,
Walls and windows of a surgical procedure,
All lines and tubes, bent steal and remains,
Like a building you see in war documentaries,
Except this one bombed by fiscal management,
Recovery a financial risk, uselessness quarantined,
Without brain function, like municipal government.
And since the hospital has been sick
The neighborhood has open sores
Like someone amputated the streets
Giving nowhere to heal those with nowhere to go.
The hospital’s been sick so long
The sick have grown well and then sick again.
Those who died here exist in a state of grace.
Everyone born here is born again in other ruins.
Of all the beings we see expire in our lives
Nothing is like seeing a building stop breathing,
That’s a Code Blue to which no one responds
Except demolition crews and trucks, and they’re too late.
Salvatore Ala, 16 june 2013
My America
My America is all Detroit, Motown, dancing in the streets, my girl,
Tropical heat waves and what becomes of the broken hearted after a riot.
My America is the 67 riot and flames above the city,
My America is the arrival of The National Guard, revolution in the air,
CKLW news and the “murder-meter” rising.
My America is The Spirit of Detroit and The Joe Louis Fist.
My America is Rosa Parks and visits by Martin Luther King.
My America is where the South was born after the South had died.
My America is getting out of neighbourhoods before dark.
My America is the auto industry and temporary-part-time wages.
My America is the war machine that beat back Nazis and fascists.
My America is the Vernors factory since 1866, Stroh’s Beer,
Jack Kevorkian and a suicide-assisted death at the end of an assembly line.
My America is rock concerts at Cobo Hall, jazz at Baker’s Keyboard Lounge,
Gang violence in the hypnotic haze of Thai stick and funk.
My America is all muscle cars and available parts.
My America is a union town with mob connections,
A road map that leads to Jimmy Hoffa, like a missing treasure.
My America is all Detroit, where my family lay in cemeteries around,
A border where half of me is standing and half in the ground.
Salvatore Ala, 15 june 2013
On a Photograph of an Abandoned Southern Home
Take me back to the earth,
as I lay dying I lay breaking.
Come home lost son and wayward daughter,
it is still sanctuary where I am father.
Birds are born from flowers
and trees wear sylvan robes
of beautiful abandonment.
Friends and ghosts of a delta wedding
glimmer in the moonlit garden.
Blow into my windows wild nature,
raise your children of inevitable
impermanent incongruous nature,
and I’ll be home when I am not
and I’ll be home when I am not.
Salvatore Ala, 10 august 2012
The Becoming
Abyssus abyssum invocat
For weeks I felt revenant,
Embraced by vampires,
Leeched and guzzled,
Sapped of blood and spirit,
My shadow was more real.
The sun honed its edge,
Carved out my darkness,
Shaved me to the grave,
Perfecting my disguise
Like a kindred apportation.
All children of millennia
Are superstitious mathematicians
Plussing negative numbers
Minus the undead.
We are fixed to one place,
Our place is next to dust.
Salvation from eternal night?
A bastard incarnate light.
I woke from my anemic trance.
Sunrise in the monster village
And all my strength was back.
Latest comments:
1 may 2024
violetta
Tak;)
1 may 2024
kb
złotej*
1 may 2024
kontoler żłotej poświaty
1 may 2024
samo życie, każdy swoje brudy ma, lepsze czy
1 may 2024
romantyczny to romantyczny, prawdziwy taki
1 may 2024
ten ketchup to fakt, trzeba przypilnować przy
1 may 2024
interesujący przekaz, jak dla mnie o własnej
1 may 2024
jakby trzy style w jednej substancji :)
1 may 2024
ucieczka z przewidzianym powrotem to też stabilizacja...
29 april 2024
Nie jest niczym podyktowany:)
29 april 2024
sam53
nic nowego, wszystko mam pod kontrolą... tak
29 april 2024
a jak wygląda nieromantyczny pocałunek...?
3 may 2024
wiesiek
3 may 2024
Satish Verma
1 may 2024
Satish Verma
30 april 2024
Satish Verma
29 april 2024
Satish Verma
28 april 2024
Jaga
28 april 2024
Satish Verma
27 april 2024
Jaga
27 april 2024
Satish Verma
26 april 2024
Satish Verma