Caye Caulker, Belize

In a motorboat skimming across Caribbean

Blue, the shirtless Islander pilots like a pirate.

One-hand on the wheel, he tells today's tourists

Stories of his Great Barrier Reef Boyhood.

Listening with lust, novice young snorkelers

Adjust their unfamiliar equipment, and awkwardly

Await their turn in the turquoise below.

A ceiling fan revolves, whirs, hums, delivers

Tiny breezes across naked bodies, sprawled

Like already forgotten suburbs. From the wall, a lazy

Lizard watches the only movement in the room–

A single thumb stroking a satisfied cheek. Outside,

The regularly-scheduled afternoon thunderstorm

Tells the stirring lovers in Neverland: Go back to sleep.

Escaping through make-believe walls, the sound

Of reggae rhythms, melodies.  At sunset, lured
By unbroken beats, sandaled feet wander from boats
And beds toward the bar. Reefer floats on the sea air.

Barefoot and nearly bare-bodied, American girls sway

With Rasta boys on floors of sand. Sometimes,
They stay, and raise beautiful blue-in-the-moonlight babies.

But most times, they manage to barely not miss the boat,

the bus, the plane, and end up in a gray airport, inadequately
dressed, asleep on a cold seat, waiting for a ride home.

not tonight

The lights have gone out in Caloocan City.
You'll need to tell them.       Tomorrow
Would be a good day.  You need to say, "There is no God
In Caloocan City, not tonight."

While we slept, God got torn apart—
Not north by south or state by state, or even zip code
By zip code.  No,    God got torn apart neighborhood
By neighborhood, house by house, apartment

By apartment.  But really, it was life
By life, sifted out by the parties they attended
To.      You could ask them to remember the radio–
How it tried so hard to find the middle,

But no one had the mindset.
So they said they didn't have the money.
They said, "The churches will save the slums–
Go back to bed."      But

The lights have gone out in Caloocan City.
You need to tell them.      Tomorrow
Would be a good day.

Vespers for the Voiceless

If I were to commission a stained-glass window for my Church,
It would be a single Nightingale upon a beech branch in springtime.
Her tongueless trills would be the Hymns we would sing at sundown—
No noticeable pattern, only an algorithm inherited from the Ancients.

Our Priestess wears her sandy plumage as a sacred vestment,
Her legitimate lineage endows her with the power to Pardon.
Her mutilated blessings would help us to forgive our Tereusian Trespassers,
And dare her Congregation to turn laments into Praise.