Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Outside the Net

When the world was real, I had Biddle Street,
its smell of grime and gravy, its ghosts dressed
like cathedrals, its beggars dressed like ghosts,

the concrete hill that was my life
with the monument on top done up in purple
when the ravens came to town and I had left

to drink lemonade with Sufis and eat oranges with virgins
who wrote ancient Chinese channelings in sand
in yellow houses in the deep evangelical South;

I was simply chasing purple, the shade I finally found
when I saw Jesus tip his titty dancer Mary
in an all-you-can-eat casino in North Las Vegas.

How much easier it was, then, to know what was actual,
for it glinted like a crystal in my hand, reunited with my cells
and now it swims before my eyes whenever I close them.

It's a cry that can't be heard inside this box
that's now the world, that collects all the facts
but not that purple, the bird itself, its arc of flight.