Poemunity — your poem community

There once was a bamboo ladder. It reached up to the sky. And the Japanese man Did tricks on the ladder And said what a good man am I.

I want you to know how it felt to hold it, deep in the well of my eye. You, future person: star of one of my complicated dooms — This one’s called Back to the Dark. Scene 1: Death stampedes through the server-cities. Somehow we all end up living in caves, foraging in civic ruin. Banana Palace— the last of the last of my kind who can read breathes it hot into your doom-rimed ear. She’s a dowser of spine-broken books and loose paper the rest of your famishing band thinks mad. • Mine was the era of spending your time in town squares made out of air. You invented a face and moved it around, visited briefly with other faces. Thus we streamed down lit screens sharing pictures of animals looking ridiculous — trading portals to shoes, love, songs, news, somebody’s latest rabid cause: bosses, gluten, bacon, God — Information about information was the pollen we deposited — while in the real fields bees starved. Into this noise sailed Banana Palace. • It was a mother ship of gold. Shining out between happy bday katie ! and a photo of someone’s broken toe — Like luminous pillows cocked on a hinge, like a house with a heavy lid, a round house of platelets and honey — It was open, like a box that holds a ring. And inside, where the ring would be: • I think about you a lot, future person. How you will need all the books that were ever read when the screens and wires go dumb. Whatever you haven’t used for kindling or bedding. Whatever made it through the fuckcluster of bombs we launched accidentally, at the end of the era of feeling like no one was doing a thing about our complicated dooms — Helpless and braced we sat in dark spaces submerged in pools of projected images, trying to disappear into light — Light! There was so much light! It was hard to sleep. • Anyway. Banana Palace. Even now when I say it, cymbals shiver out in spheres. It starts to turn its yellow gears and opens like a clam. Revealing a fetal curl on its temple floor, bagged and sleeping — a white cocoon under lit strings that stretch from floor to ceiling — a harp made of glass incubating a covered • pearl — We broke the world you’re living in, future person. Maybe that was always our end: to break the jungles to get at the sugar, leave behind a waste of cane — There came a time I couldn’t look at trees without feeling elegiac — as if nature were already over, if you know what I mean. It was the most glorious thing I had ever seen. Cross-section of a banana under a microscope the caption read. I hunched around my little screen sharing a fruit no one could eat.

They are tall herbs, really, not trees, though they can shoot up thirty feet if all goes well for them. Cut in cross section they look like gigantic onions, multi-layered mysteries with ghostly hearts. Their leaves are made to be broken by the wind, if wind there be, but the crosswise tears they are built to expect do them no harm. Around the steady staff of the leafstalk the broken fronds flap in the breeze like brief forgotten flags, but these tattered, green, photosynthetic machines know how to grasp with their broken fingers the gold coins of light that give open air its shine. In hot, dry weather the fingers fold down to touch on each side-- a kind of prayer to clasp what damp they can against the too much light.

Full of strength and laced with fragility: the thoroughbred, the hummingbird, and all things cursed with agility.

Banish Air from Air - Divide Light if you dare - They'll meet While Cubes in a Drop Or Pellets of Shape Fit - Films cannot annul Odors return whole Force Flame And with a Blonde push Over your impotence Flits Steam.

Whoever it was who brought the first wood and coal To start the Fire, did his part well; Not all wood takes to fire from a match, Nor coal from wood before it’s burned to charcoal. The wood and coal in question caught a flame And flared up beautifully, touching the air That takes a flame from anything. Somehow the fire was furnaced, And then the time was ripe for some to say, “Right banking of the furnace saves the coal.” I’ve seen them set to work, each in his way, Though all with shovels and with ashes, Never resting till the fire seemed most dead; Whereupon they’d crawl in hooded night-caps Contentedly to bed. Sometimes the fire left alone Would die, but like as not spiced tongues Remaining by the hardest on till day would flicker up, Never strong, to anyone who cared to rake for them. But roaring fires never have been made that way. I’d like to tell those folks that one grand flare Transferred to memory tissues of the air Is worth a like, or, for dull minds that turn in gold, All money ever saved by banking coal.

They have us corralled in the basement of the courthouse. One desk and a row of folding chairs— just like first grade, our desks facing Teacher in neat little rows. Upstairs, wooden benches like pews and red carpet reserved for those who’ve held out the longest. No creditors have come to claim us today. We’re small-time. This guy from the graveyard shift stares at his steel-toed boots, nervous hands in his lap. None of us look each other in the eye. We steal quick looks—how did you get here

What did he do except lie under a pear tree, wrapped in a great cloak, and meditate on the heavenly bodies? Venerable , the good people of Baltimore whispered, shocked and more than a little afraid. After all it was said he took to strong drink. Why else would he stay out under the stars all night and why hadn’t he married? But who would want him! Neither Ethiopian nor English, neither lucky nor crazy, a capacious bird humming as he penned in his mind another enflamed letter to President Jefferson—he imagined the reply, polite and rhetorical. Those who had been to Philadelphia reported the statue of Benjamin Franklin before the library his very size and likeness. A wife? No, thank you. At dawn he milked the cows, then went inside and put on a pot to stew while he slept. The clock he whittled as a boy still ran. Neighbors woke him up with warm bread and quilts. At nightfall he took out his rifle—a white-maned figure stalking the darkened breast of the Union—and shot at the stars, and by chance one went out. Had he killed? I assure thee, my dear Sir! Lowering his eyes to fields sweet with the rot of spring, he could see a government’s domed city rising from the morass and spreading in a spiral of lights....

Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan Of tan with henna hackles, halt! Damned universal cock, as if the sun Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail. Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal. Your world is you. I am my world. You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat! Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines, Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs, And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos.

for Jane Draycott As winter secrets melt with the purple sun, what is revealed is electric — notes tune unknown scales, syntax alters tongues, terracotta melts white, banyan ribbons into armatures as branch-roots twist, meeting soil in a circle. Circuits glazed under cloth carry alphabets for a calligrapher’s nib italicised in invisible ink, letters never posted, cartographer’s map, uncharted — as phrases fold so do veils.