Wisdom Teeth

The air humid
with humility
dust scattered with
philosophies

I sit
and drown
in reveries

my dirt mouth
drowns
cacophony

but I'll awaken
tomorrow
with wisdom teeth.

Morocco

The sacred fire was cradling its last logs
before its sleep at the end of summer,
and night was settling itself into the sands.
Your eyes were milky moons
and your fingers danced through your dreadlocks,
holding each one alone up to the fire light,
blurring their colours in the smoke.
You told me what each of their stories were.

This red is the rock atop the mountains
and this orange is that of the dunes,
this is the blue of painted buildings,
this is the green of crops with their flowers in bloom,
this is the white of the stone in the cities
and this is the yellow green of the mint tea
and this is the gold of the stone by the shore
and this is the turquoise of the sea

We're leaving at the setting of the sun.
When the fire burns out we'll pack up the tents
and hitch back to the van.
We'll leave with the cool night
sinking into the silver of the roads
with spliff smoke in our throats
and blowing out of the windows.
If we drive quickly we'll be there by tomorrow.

And in the morning they rode towards technicolour dunes
and I rode through the metal highways, until England was in view
down a long black tunnel caked with gasoline smell.

I called her from a payphone
and through a thousand miles of cable
asked what Morocco was like in summer.
Through the high tones in her voice
the desert shone through.
She sang these dunes can dance;
they miss you.

thoughts on poetry and its critique

Try telling the thousands
all around the world
that 'I have a dream' wouldn't be
a poetic symphony
if the sounds of the vowels didn't drop
on each second syllable
and take the proverbial step-back
letting the concept take the forefront
of the phrase

Try telling the ex-slave traders
that that single wave of thought
skipping silently
into the mind of their society
wasn't scary
because it lacked a bastard 'b'
to blacken the occasion

And try telling me this
without a hint of poetic integrity-
no assonance with i's and e's intertwining
on the page
and the writer stepping back surprised
at the shocking twists of phrase,
the form and rhyme within the lines
that connotate and connotate

Or give me a just phrase
of nonsense poetry
that is beautiful purely
because of the writers sonical
and lyrical ability
skipping between the Tumtum trees
with no cognitive responsibility.

Please, just give me language,
a tool to connect minds.
Allow the words to breathe
and you might find
within them, a dream
of truth and rhyme combined.