Voices From Broken Windows (A Feast of Friends)
1.
The sun oozes down
the sky,
soaking everything
with blood,
as it carves shadowy
fingers into bits of
shattered glass and
stares out into the empty
pastures where vacant
farm houses collide
with the green oceans
barely visible in
mists of morning,
which soon disappear
behind the rocks of
decaying creek beds,
and trees trembles
with the distant roar
of gun shots,
or perhaps the echoing
backfire of countless
rusted out pickup trucks,
guzzling gasoline and
belching fire,
as the sky twists
it's through clouds
like parted lips,
which beg for the
best drugs money
can buy,
and for a moment
I swear it was all
just a dream
which I then wake
from with a jolt,
the poems reverberating
in my mind,
grasping in darkness
for a pen so that
I may capture them
before they can
escape
and become nothing
more than an endless
loop of background
noise as the
dust caked blinds
rattle with the ghost
dances of my kitten's
curious claws,
as she raises her
tiny ears to listen
to the screaming
voices from a
thousand broken
windows.
2.
Eyes rolled back
and half glazed over,
feet planted mere
steps apart,
the room filling with
the heat of strangers
who quickly become
dearest friends.
It's almost hot enough
to melt all the wax
sitting in the racks
as the sounds of
passing sirens one
flight of stairs below
swirls in twitching threads
of sound in between
the glacial guitar tones
being tossed out by
the three men on stage.
The stage is actually
just a taped off corner
of the thinly carpeted
room framed with twinkling,
purple Christmas lights.
I've known this band
for longer than life
itself,
the songs they play
have been going since
the dawn of man and
if you listen closely
to the faint whisper
of the wind I swear
you can hear them,
even now,
on the morning
after my throat is
still raw and brittle
from shrieking down
the twin barrels of
the microphone as
the poems sputtered
from moon kissed lips
over the swell of
the drunken mountain
evening,
everything happening
as if in a dream,
and it really is a dream,
one I've had since
I was just a kid,
and it is their
dream as well,
forever existing to
be plucked from the
gutter of the moment.
It's hovered there
from the moment I was
fifteen years old and
I smoked marijuana and
wrote "A Dream of New York"
in a stolen notebook
in the afternoon glow
on my grandmother's
bed and then wept,
only managing to
wake five years ago
just in time to throw
open every window and
let the tidal waves escape
from my mind at last.
As I slept soundly
the earth swallowed
up so many friends
like Gypsy children
stolen in the night,
and here I sketched
then screamed my farewells
onto the spinal cord
of noise until I could
no longer speak,
the applause rising
to capture my tears
and then cascade off
into the North Carolina
night to smoke
on the stairwell as
we did as teenagers,
praying we wouldn't
be found out,
only now with
wives and children,
and jobs to go to
in the morning.
I couldn't be
who I am
if they weren't
who they are,
and just then
the music surges
and twinkles like
the strange and
beautiful epiphany
that it is,
wrapped up in
the choir of angel's
voices screaming from
broken windows deep
in the Autumn night.