Salvatore Ala, 5 september 2013
The first is my window blinds.
Slats with pull cords
Between light and dark.
The second is my carpet.
A magic carpet of wine tracks
Notated by cannabis tacks.
The third is the cigarette tin
In which I keep my addiction
To loose change and nicotine.
Fourth, a few fossils
I found on a beach
In primeval childhood.
Next to last my old pool cue.
I play impossible shots
On imaginary tables.
Finally, a faded photograph
In inexpensive frame
Of someone loved and lost.
Salvatore Ala, 29 august 2013
When everything is repaired with gold leaf
Good will shines brighter through our blood
Like a poem with golden seams or a living art.
So your favorite bowl shattered like the world,
Its pieces are still a bowl.
It could also be a more beautiful world.
Salvatore Ala, 10 july 2013
In so much rain the homeless drown,
If this rain was bullets they’d be children of massacres.
If this rain was petroleum coke we’d already be Pompeii.
If this rain was a pesticide we’d be innumerable bees
Found dead in parking lots round the world.
If this rain was plague we’d be shadows among Pharaohs.
If this rain was money we’d drink from the same well.
If this rain was food the hungry could eat their tears.
If this rain was love, hatred would dissipate like haze.
If this rain was peace, peace would water our lands.
If this rain was rage, God would haemorrhage
From a wound at least as mortal as our own.
Salvatore Ala, 5 july 2013
This is a poem that fills
The emptiness of a bowl.
This is also a poem
That empties the fullness of the bowl.
This is a poem.
Salvatore Ala, 5 july 2013
In your own words
You can take the road not chosen
And arrive at the idea of order at Key West,
Or gather at the river
Where the branch will not break.
What lips my lips have kissed
Are words for the wind.
This is just to say, America,
I carry you in my heart
Like a dream deferred.
Salvatore Ala, 24 june 2013
I went to Ambassador Park,
What an eyesore that petroleum coke.
If Zug Island wasn’t displeasing
With its Windsor boom and toxic look,
Now they let petroleum peddlers
Dump their junk on the downtown river.
This is what they think of people.
This is what they think of the earth.
When did that neighborhood
Become an industrial site? First the riots
Then recession and the crash.
Didn’t anyone pick anyone else up?
If Detroit is hell on wheels
With incinerator and coke piles
It’s hell in sky and water.
Tankers load up with thermo-crack,
A cloud in the river spreads
Like an oil slick big as the cloud.
West of us sundown is ablaze,
That’s the sunset of a non-earth.
Salvatore Ala, 20 june 2013
Saw Grace Hospital operated on yesterday,
Walls and windows of a surgical procedure,
All lines and tubes, bent steal and remains,
Like a building you see in war documentaries,
Except this one bombed by fiscal management,
Recovery a financial risk, uselessness quarantined,
Without brain function, like municipal government.
And since the hospital has been sick
The neighborhood has open sores
Like someone amputated the streets
Giving nowhere to heal those with nowhere to go.
The hospital’s been sick so long
The sick have grown well and then sick again.
Those who died here exist in a state of grace.
Everyone born here is born again in other ruins.
Of all the beings we see expire in our lives
Nothing is like seeing a building stop breathing,
That’s a Code Blue to which no one responds
Except demolition crews and trucks, and they’re too late.
Salvatore Ala, 16 june 2013
My America is all Detroit, Motown, dancing in the streets, my girl,
Tropical heat waves and what becomes of the broken hearted after a riot.
My America is the 67 riot and flames above the city,
My America is the arrival of The National Guard, revolution in the air,
CKLW news and the “murder-meter” rising.
My America is The Spirit of Detroit and The Joe Louis Fist.
My America is Rosa Parks and visits by Martin Luther King.
My America is where the South was born after the South had died.
My America is getting out of neighbourhoods before dark.
My America is the auto industry and temporary-part-time wages.
My America is the war machine that beat back Nazis and fascists.
My America is the Vernors factory since 1866, Stroh’s Beer,
Jack Kevorkian and a suicide-assisted death at the end of an assembly line.
My America is rock concerts at Cobo Hall, jazz at Baker’s Keyboard Lounge,
Gang violence in the hypnotic haze of Thai stick and funk.
My America is all muscle cars and available parts.
My America is a union town with mob connections,
A road map that leads to Jimmy Hoffa, like a missing treasure.
My America is all Detroit, where my family lay in cemeteries around,
A border where half of me is standing and half in the ground.
Salvatore Ala, 15 june 2013
Take me back to the earth,
as I lay dying I lay breaking.
Come home lost son and wayward daughter,
it is still sanctuary where I am father.
Birds are born from flowers
and trees wear sylvan robes
of beautiful abandonment.
Friends and ghosts of a delta wedding
glimmer in the moonlit garden.
Blow into my windows wild nature,
raise your children of inevitable
impermanent incongruous nature,
and I’ll be home when I am not
and I’ll be home when I am not.
Salvatore Ala, 10 august 2012
Abyssus abyssum invocat
For weeks I felt revenant,
Embraced by vampires,
Leeched and guzzled,
Sapped of blood and spirit,
My shadow was more real.
The sun honed its edge,
Carved out my darkness,
Shaved me to the grave,
Perfecting my disguise
Like a kindred apportation.
All children of millennia
Are superstitious mathematicians
Plussing negative numbers
Minus the undead.
We are fixed to one place,
Our place is next to dust.
Salvation from eternal night?
A bastard incarnate light.
I woke from my anemic trance.
Sunrise in the monster village
And all my strength was back.
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