The room is as dark as an elevator
whose light has burnt out.  Like trash, our jungle
jabber litters the room.  Then from the center
she speaks, and a stream of amber impossible
light flows like smoke from her mouth.  This
stream of amber impossible light forms and feeds
a growing cloud, a floating lake of light,
that illuminates only the things it caresses.
Finally shadowless, our room begins to rise.
 
Now our room is rising, and now she is
working hard, rocking, grinding her voice against
gravity.  A happy strain appears on her face—
the same happy strain that appears on the face
of a good man who is changing a flat
tire beside the freeway while his wife and
kids sit quiet for once in the car,
and the good man knows that the silent prayers
of his family are all that stand between
his naked ass and the murderous wheel—the steel
and speed—of the rush hour traffic machine.

We begin to feed the poetess with our
attention: the bellies of our hearts pump
power into the belly of her heart until
at last the room breaks loose, and we
float free from the pull of our
birthplace, our graveplace—the earth.

A good smell rises in the amber room,
better than bread baking or roses crushed
in your fist, better even than the aroma
of tobacco to a sailor.  It's the same perfume
which rises from the heads of small children
who've been playing outside in the summer
dust, whenever you bend over to pick
them up—an odor whose power
can keep your heart pumping forever.
 
Now the voice of the poetess darkens—
black liquid syllables pulse from her mouth—
and the amber impossible light is forced
into the walls, ceiling and floor of the room,
transforming them into clear glass.

We look out, we look back from our dark glass
box in space, to see the earth—a turquoise stone
tied on a string and twirled by a small red girl
who laughs as she skips to her grandfather's house.

It's time for a ten-minute break.  The poetess
lights up a small cigar, and we light up our
cigarettes—our Camels and Lucky Strikes.
She is our queen, our big queen firefly,
and she teaches our cigarettes how to dance.
Before the ten minutes are up, using only
the glow of her small cigar, she fiddles
the complete Brandenburg Concertos.
She plays with a country twang.

Our break is over, the moon looms huge,
the poetess fires up her voice again—all
engines, all chakras, wide open and throbbing.
We make a wild wide slide to the right.
Bearing down to brake us, the poetess strips
her voice, turns it inside out, crying deep
like a woman in labor.  We lend a heart
and our ship touches down with a thud
in the dust on the dark side of the moon.

It's as dark here on the dark side of the moon
as a rainy night in Mississippi or
Siberia.  We follow the poetess out of the room.
All we can see is the glow of her earrings—
two silver triangles dangling from each
of her ears.  These earrings lead us over
a rise.  Dead moon dust is up to our ankles

In the hollow below we see torchlight, we
see gnomes—black, ancient, wise as Pygmies.
They push wheelbarrows on plywood tracks—
red wheelbarrows filled with rainwater.
The rainwater's dumped into ditches of dust.
Moon mud is made, rich and delicious.
From this matrix of moon mud, animals of
many colors emerge, mammals, all of them
strange to the earth, except for the elephants.

It's obvious which elephant's in charge here:
he's got that executive aura.
Our poetess approaches him, curtsies, bows.
From between the eyes of the elephant king
a beam of light comes slowly, tinged with pink,
as thick as a firehose.  From between the eyes
of the poetess, a green gardenhose of
light comes slowly.  These beams entwine
like snakes until the exchange of news
is complete, and then they slowly retract.

Flatcars stand on a narrow gauge railroad track.
On them are cages containing rudimentary
human souls.  Outside of each cage is a teacher
wearing a circus clown suit.  Their ancient,
Asian, yellow faces have been painted white.
They teach the raw souls the ways of the
moon—how to survive, how to serve here.

These rudimentary human souls
look just like us, look blank, look stunned,
like a man does when he realizes
that his pocket's been picked.