Who walks out through these streets tonight?

I sit at my desk tonight, outside surrounded by those
who have done and still spare the time to doze
and wonder: "Who walks out through these streets tonight?"
These streets, we speak, find well-trodden busees alight
and meeting on feet that stream through gravel
to the music of green-tinted taxis' horns.

Branches hang themselves from sheared trees in plots
every ten steps, their knots healing from the scourge.
Bicycles, primitive like the early day's creation, ride
their passengers to where the bikes will take them.
The observation happens by me like understated
hunger rising under intentional conveyance and fasting.

Thoughts let themelves come in and sip
a drink of coffee among the furniture dressed
for far-more welcomed guests. Instead, he
spills his coffee on my rug. The rag in my hand
blots, not scrubs, away most of the stain.
"Someone taught me that," I think.

It took six days to take a world asunder
and speak a land where lightning's thunder
can be felt by me and by my sons with wonder.
I chose to be killed and after three days rise again:
What will you do tonight in full view of this?

Who will carry my banner?
Who will share in this suffering?

The top of the mountain's grandeur
speaks of soft, warm breezes that curl
around my bare feet, and hers, and we stare
at the twilight nigh behind the Appalachian stairs.
This quaint moment and she are but
quiet memory among these nobling sons:

a two-by-two square of men who dare
to forsake the safe pavement's thoroughfare.
"Live it out," we speak through bustling streets
with words and eyes some here have never heard or seen.
"If this whole thing gets messy," we say and pause.
"When this thing gets messy, remember where we've been.

Give thanks and do not forsake
the giver for the gift of the day."

Comments on Bernard Madoff

Today I read an article on www.yahoo.com called "Madoff Pleads Guilty and goes to jail in handcuffs." Certainly, the implication of this man's dignity being stripped from him is real, but what struck me most about the article was that he was "avoiding eye contact with swindled investors" as he left.

Somehow over several decades, this man convinced himself and others that he was legitimately building a firm, but ended up barren in the end. Boy, do we ever see that in his eyes here. The gretest irony is the use of the word "firm" at all, as it became clear that his hope was only in scrapping the icing off of styrofoam cakes. For a man so close to the end of his days to lose even the hollowest respect for myself and others, it magnifies the duty and the fruits of peace in risking even the most awkward of situations to keep your conscience clear before man.

One Sanyan Fruitstand

"Remeber this moment, boys.

This is the best day of our lives."

I never thought to drop even a moment's

rememberance to that fragrant embrace--

we can smell salty sea and fish,

shucked pineapple husks, and

sunburnt lips grip the tips of some tropic twist.

The store owner, young and olive skin alive,

gives us her only chairs.

We sit, three of us, in some long-held

desire for perfect unity and found

that you learn the sufficiency

of a motor cycle helmet

cruising downt he hainan biway

only after the fall.

And, above, the fireworks sing

their sweet mystery

over the sands--we can dig,

and do, to where these sands

meet the sea: there, in a puddle, we drown.