Chai

(for Malkah)

Strumming your guitar
Strumming your sixth sense
Strumming the Heavens with your cup over flowing

Words like paint burst forth like droplets of blood and honey
A messenger arrived in the night bursting with sunlight
A lantern of foresight burns inside you

Rilke spoke of the bees of the invisible
He spoke loudly and he spoke clearly
Rilke like Milton communicated with God out of pure devotion

Your every move lights up the sky like shooting stars
Do you recall sitting on Mark Twain’s knee as he spun you the tallest of tales?
Every time you walk out onto the unfashionable stage an angel learns how to fly

We’re all children still in some fashion or another capable of responding to both suffering and joy
Even a Pale Horse must be led to water from time to time and made to drink.

Charles Cicirella
September 21, 2009

Innuendo

(for Malkah)

title came yesterday
then I forgot
slept instead

Charlie Patton screamin’ and hollerin’
Mississippi Delta
roaring in cans

no innuendo
no impropriety
no indirection

title arrived late last night
wrestled me to cold ground
like a tentative whisper

I knew when it materialized
it would be for you Malkah
a convertible poem for a convertible kinda girl

roll windows down
throw out peanut shells
Gabriel’s Horn both infinite and finite

Charles Cicirella
September 19, 2009

I Don’t Feel Like Driving Through The Sun Today

(for Malkah)

Air conditioning just went on
Dust is everywhere
Carl Sagan isn’t returning any of my calls.

I don’t feel like driving through the sun today
Don’t feel like pretending I like you or that I actually ever did
Last time I felt anything medication meant aspirin not a bullet to the head.

I was flipping burgers when I got the call
He stood on a little garbage pail and ended his life
It’s been eleven years and I still couldn’t say how I feel.

Sure I miss him
Sure I miss feeling like someone actually gets me
Sure I miss not having to explain every little thing.

Can’t wait till the air goes back on
Maybe it will help disperse some of this dust
Maybe Carl Sagan will rise from the dead and tell us what it was like meeting Walt Disney.

I don’t feel like looking or even touching the telephone today
Did you ever cover up your television realizing once and for all how much it controls us?
First time I got high I was rolling around in the grass not smoking it.

Charles Cicirella
September 14, 2009