The Strand
 
Now you trace mandalas
in writer’s sand,
coughed up by tubercular membrains
 
Ruminating for an hour after each word
so as not to get a cramp,
You swim through the hull of drunken trips
to campgrounds and theme parks
 
Peering through your clear bubble umbrella
at the drizzle
and the Navy men on leave,
roaming among the Looney Tunes.
 
Scattering the cremated
ashes of adolescence,
you vandalize the stars
for your own astronomical entertainment.
 
The regular customers haunt the paper
seeking a voice between enemy lines,
they insist on being committed
but you cannot fairly deal them,
marked as they are -
to cheat the reader
would brand you a fraud
 
yet the pen cannot unstick
from such deceptively
gripping asphalt.

 
 
The Last Word 
 
You can still hear them
on the streets of the city.
By the end of the century
half will be dead, swallowed whole
sputtering, stuttering out,
tongues untied.
 
Epics are recited
from caves to slavery.
The birth of prophets,
the voices of kings,
voices of faith
no longer accompanied
by drums and trumpets.
 
Morphed into creole, pidgin,
Spanglish and Franglais
the whore of words
thrives in the streets.
Language is alive
let it go or forever
hold your p’s and q’s.