THE STRUGGLE AND THE EXODUS

long before the feet did

it was my eyes who left, my heart

sore and wet, shiny like a full moon in the sea, moist like fog

and just as impenetrable.

i kept a steady pace, over the mountain tops,

beyond the rocky crown of homeland

searching for the marching beat, scanning my changing horizon for a spiritual parent, a poet, a revolutionary

and finding allsorts, more often

scoring a fuck than salvation

but learning to apprehend something

from everything,

that a teacher can wear as little as a cockring

or all the world’s phd’s wrapped around his or her humanism

till his or her humanity’s been covered

deflected, surpassed in the name of curricular

                                                               activity

                                                                        & dispensed.

long before my feet did,

it was my joy, who parted ways

to save itself and find a buddy

in someone else’s despairing fits of life disguised as pubescent rage

and

dance along creaking floorboards through the night

along the po, canals, the thames,

the yarra hand in hand

to comprehend in steps the mysterious waltz of friendship,

the spinning polkas of love at first sight in a drunken bar, dark in an alley, soho square

dover house - our unglorious chelsea hotel,

our dips and troughs, and our

flops, even they were flux, flight, flow.

sure enough, for coherence dictates our every move,

limbs were set into motion,

rather a gentle marathon – swift feet carried away,

as if a new order of church bells – appealing, these ones, redemptive

were summoning us,

as if our own will was sirens in the distance, their song persuading us now

as before it’d charmed and teased.

& lured i was – with you,

suddenly: communion, a partnership.

and if the rest is history

as in a story we write black on white, sweat on forehead, man on man

if it is true that our bodies bear the marks of each caress and kiss

like an ariadne’s thread leading us back

to our freedom of choice, the choice to chose love every time

we had a choice

then

i have no/thing to regret

you have no/thing to forget

we’re on the right track

the only path where value is still valued

where the market is a place we go to, to feed body and soul

and not a poisoned cornucopia

of dislodged ciphers, the evil of goods unhinged from reality: the reality of people struggling for human recognition

the reality where the square is not what we are commanded to think within and vacate when thought steps out of it

but the ancient gathering space to which we add dimensions of solidarity,

that the poor enrich

where poetics equates praxis

where word equals sword and

blood is never spilled for anything less than

an idea of freedom that would put the angels to shame in their pale,

sickly promise of transcendence

because long before we stuffed our heads with slogans

we had mouths full of poetry

before the prism split us into rainbow

to separate the colours

red from green, black from blue, me, not you

before power was a spell to be under or atop

we were sun, thunder, dirt and crop.