Firstly

Poem written on a doorstep on the Cerrer De L’Hospital

This city celebrates its festival of heat
With its rough cut men
And its sun-blessed women,
And children playing in the street,
Their faces ripe like fruit.

The shop windows are graffitied with freedom
– the ambitious language of life,
And the day fills with a pungent war of feeling.
At night the branches of Barcelona
Mingle in a crowded dance,
And its veins are lit with
The blood of love.

But through the rhythms
My thoughts like flames
Reach for your body,
To your laughter under
Street lamps,
To your nakedness folded open,
And your shapes wet against
White tiles.

And I think of your Venus belly.
Curved and covered
In a moonlight skin,
Warm and luxurious like
A Spanish morning.


Flashes of you

Pearls of laughter fall from your shoulder
As your face bends backward in a bamboo smile.
Each circle of your skin is fresh,
Each flicker of your breath floats like winter.

Your eyes move in currents of black water,
A rolling fortress on all sides.
Your body is the flesh of mystery, the mouth of touch,
And your heart marches to the whims of the tide.

You are an Indigo moon,
Crowded out by the smoke of the clouds.
You are the wisp of a crescent soul,
A flame buried in the earth with no sound.


Chuck D

Chuck D
Laughs like Buddha.
Chuck D is his own religion
A blend of compassion
And the pointed venom
Of violence.
Chuck D raps with his lips
Aflame.
Spits and burns holes in your eye.

Chuck D
Rips open the mind.
Unlocks love with a gunshot.
Chuck D is a philosopher king
Wild priest, poet laureate
Rap scholar, father figure
Of the rebel rabble.

Chuck D
Sweats in rhythms
An angry shaman
Uses the beat in
Vicious sacrament.
He cuts open culture
And bleeds out its myth.

Chuck D
Is a black earthquake.
Prizes open the streets
Cracks up the unconscious
In a riot of ideas.
Chuck D is the last
Soldier standing,
Defiant, calm
Careless, wise.

His eyes are sacred stones.
His face like a Vedic painting.
On stage he is a moving mantra,
Repeating to the unleashed beat,

All is culture
All is culture.