SAHARA BLUES VIII

I.

I see truths of yesteryears
revered by whispers of dirges;
abominations of old eulogized
at the crossroads of renaissance.

II.

I see traces of our past
hung in the museum
of fading memories;
rituals of our ancestors hurled
to the wandering wind.

III.

Tattooed on the skin of modernism
are epitaphs of tradition.

Wirra!
no one can erase it.

IV.

We are now a dyed-gourd
with a licking exterior; a
generation plagued with
inferiority complex

For our culture rots
and there are no longer battalions
to slay those predators feasting
on the womb of negritude.

Save us.

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DREAMS

Fools see dreams in figments of denarii.
They measure dreams with the barometer of megahits.

But are dreams
glorified blue ribbons,
sublunary medallions cum summa cum laude?
No.

Are dreams the utility
derived from exfoliating legion of
worn-out crevices and bleached loins?
Never.

Are dreams —
Pierre Cardin feet or Louis Vuitton torsos?
which make sane hombres to become hauteurs.
Perhaps.

Are dreams
deferences paid to potbellied Methuselahs
who see themselves as the council of Ahithophel
and connoisseurs of Solomon — all in one.?

No.

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SERMON AT GOMORRAH

Again, I alone scorn this ritual of vespers,
This fellowship sharpened by sermons of old wives’ tale
That severs truth in gay squander.

Again, I alone disdain this sly priesthood
For whom reverence is disrobed for shekels of greed,
Decorum is crucified for thirty pieces of silver.

Alas! God’s word now a marketing tool.

We are now a congregation
impaired by spiritual fraud;

A patched ingathering
hoping to be paradise bound.

For divinity
has been battered for mundanities

And our offerings
are now used to revere
gods in the protruding bellies of clerics.