In a City of Red Ideas

Afterwards people talked, they said

idly wringing out their wash

next to the brown river,

that they all knew,

they said that the sad

donkey was the dead giveaway.

And they could tell false prophecy.

Who in the aftermath of that

would admit, “I believed, I believed”?

I wonder if that’s how we lose faith,

because in an

animal’s eyes

all there is,

is belief

and a mammal love

of god,

and yes, he is only

a jackass, and one

among many, but there

is much to be said of him

on a spiritual level.

Now when I close my eyes I see

suburbs that I never lived in

houses with red front doors

and brass knockers

and I go inside and the rooms are

each filled with the blue lights from televisions.

This is the place where fathers

send their daughters to walk carrying

some slender volumes

barefoot in the green spring

across the quad.

And the mothers taught them how to walk

that walk and there are boys too.

So

yes that is: what what’s

that is what all the talk is about,

has always been about.

In all the lives I imagined myself

I find myself in the one I had

scavenging in a wide field of stubble.

Then, there is the

one of interruption

I’m coming

Keep your pants on.

All day it has been like this,

bickering with him.

It’s been on and off for weeks.

The only thing is that

he has been dead for years

but still we bicker I have to run

everything past him, once or twice

the blue dress or the old

yellow one I wore to Esther’s wedding.

After a few years that woman

was the curator of pain

and her anger

a yellow boat hitting the rocks.

What has the world come to?

They have stuffed us so full of soy that

my bones jangle when I walk and

the fevers at night soak the sheets.

Maybe I could live on mood stabilizers?

Knowing that tremendous rush

will forever be only water.

So we get by on the

E-Z pass

and with a warlord’s greed

in a red city of ideas.