time for me

was always a labyrinth

always a bright crack overhead
closing in on three stone things—

     1.) the jagged shadows of a peppercorn vine

     2.) an unknown bird of prey
          passing over my purple notebook

     3.) a ruined fortress hewn from chyrsolite
          from where i wrote inside
          my decrepit tent of empty ribs

zanzibar

those starving kittens,
self-exiled,
recalled the approaches of foreigners,
ate jaggedly, always true,
always among the tattered sleeves,
they spent themselves three stories high
over broad sketches of trash,
broke themselves there
below the minarets,
long they saw across the far nights
that morning steeped in blood.

foreigner

in lonely places of cannons
you sometimes heard
the blue patterns of shadows
as waves beat away the walls

by then you understood

the real island speaks grass and malaria
it is only the foreigner who writes
his long yellow pages of old wounds
shuttering inside his sleeves

by then
the cold white distance of scattered tusks
assailed him

a foreigner
surrounded by odd tessellations

as if the callers
backs scourged
sought him out

it was a much more narrow interpretation of God

always the men
their stories turned Portuguese
the forests dark and filled with disappeared

wounds dark as gold

these wounds dark as gold
and the labyrinth-like fevers
in the foreigner’s coffee—

things sought
until time shakes them
from a structure grown narrow
with uncovered sun

for days he balls tourists

nowhere a stone
ever so blue as this
docked in an odd crack

God has become a small afternoon