Sunday afternoon and LA is doing August – 100F+ and fires in the suburbs. I can only fight it with poetry. This poem is not new. I wrote it in 1997 on a day much like this. It was orchestrated by Andy Colquhoun and released as part of the Deviants’ CD, Dr Crow. It will also appear in my up coming collection of poetry and short writing titled Zone Of Chaos, but more about that in approximately two weeks.
A LONG DRY SEASON
It was a long dry season and we prayed to make it to the rains
By the third week, normal sleep had all but become impossible
And, by the fourth, the river was no more than
A sluggish trickle between baking flats of moonscape mud
Dry coughing in dust storms raised by exhausted, brick oven winds
And as the TV gave up the pretense that anything was any more right in the world
Locust cowboys and coyote warriors moved in from the hills
Desperate for a drink
Looking to slake throats of parched and cracked, tooled and studded leather
With the unholy rotgut mescal of the worm
It was a long dry season and we prayed to make it to the rains
Domestic dogs organized in packs
Feeling no longer beholden to their former masters
While green death and pallid yellow aurora arced at night
Over lovers locked and loaded
With the madness of disease taken in substitute for passion
And that would ultimately end in gunfire heard for miles
As sound that carried to infinity in the alkaline air
Across the flatlands and desiccated towns
Like Gene Autry singing someplace out beyond the Gates of Eden
It was a long dry season and we prayed to make it to the rains
High wynding howling of evaporated destiny and melted insulation
Under stars without mercy or even interest
While white foam fungoid puffballs drifted from a perpetually cloudless sky
Like snowballs from hell in the red desert Martian heated quiet
Fragmenting as they struck the hard parched earth
Powering to a diaphanous dust that crept and clung
To the electromagnetic static of relentless commercial appliances
Now wholly unwatched by women with blank purple eyes
And yucca flowers in their hair
Who murmured in dreams of reflecting pools and crystal fountains
And men who searched for the impossibility
Of a cool place on the pillow
To the constant drone of a mosquito fan
Only to find themselves thirst transfixed by the Doombeam
In the hands of an apparition of Captain America
It was a long dry season and we prayed to make it to the rains
A LONG DRY SEASON
It was a long dry season and we prayed to make it to the rains
By the third week, normal sleep had all but become impossible
And, by the fourth, the river was no more than
A sluggish trickle between baking flats of moonscape mud
Dry coughing in dust storms raised by exhausted, brick oven winds
And as the TV gave up the pretense that anything was any more right in the world
Locust cowboys and coyote warriors moved in from the hills
Desperate for a drink
Looking to slake throats of parched and cracked, tooled and studded leather
With the unholy rotgut mescal of the worm
It was a long dry season and we prayed to make it to the rains
Domestic dogs organized in packs
Feeling no longer beholden to their former masters
While green death and pallid yellow aurora arced at night
Over lovers locked and loaded
With the madness of disease taken in substitute for passion
And that would ultimately end in gunfire heard for miles
As sound that carried to infinity in the alkaline air
Across the flatlands and desiccated towns
Like Gene Autry singing someplace out beyond the Gates of Eden
It was a long dry season and we prayed to make it to the rains
High wynding howling of evaporated destiny and melted insulation
Under stars without mercy or even interest
While white foam fungoid puffballs drifted from a perpetually cloudless sky
Like snowballs from hell in the red desert Martian heated quiet
Fragmenting as they struck the hard parched earth
Powering to a diaphanous dust that crept and clung
To the electromagnetic static of relentless commercial appliances
Now wholly unwatched by women with blank purple eyes
And yucca flowers in their hair
Who murmured in dreams of reflecting pools and crystal fountains
And men who searched for the impossibility
Of a cool place on the pillow
To the constant drone of a mosquito fan
Only to find themselves thirst transfixed by the Doombeam
In the hands of an apparition of Captain America
It was a long dry season and we prayed to make it to the rains
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1 comment:
Seems like I'm always waiting on something nowadays... at least this wait will see me excited instead of stressed out like near everything else.
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