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Thran
Romania is a different culture
It has high mountains
Low valleys
And Roma wandering the roads
Byways and small lax villages.
The Roma bring with them
A strange and rugged lifestyle
Comprising many sturdy children
Beautiful wayward woman
And men sated with music,
All of whom rarely rest
Between journeys
Rattled by bigoted non-comprehension
Thrashed by illiterate natives
And unintelligible customs and language.
We are all mostly unlettered
In the ways of the Roma.
They have stood strong
And tireless in their ways,
Their languages and their truths.
In our few layers of lucidity
We sometimes experience
The thran Roma,
The illegitimacy of rejecting
A people who have survived
Traveling since the 10th century
Across the persecuting earth
To marginalized inconsequence, everywhere.
And still they are in our lives
Living their lives across the tracks.
That thran streak is their calling card,
And their trauma kit,
Sheltered by rags and the mighty Carpathians.
Janus Stood Aside
Worshipping our families
Is a precious and costly pastime.
It is exhilarating,
It is exhausting,
It is fleeting,
It is tall and willowy
And not unlike the oak tree.
When it snaps
It pulls the dense roots and curved branches
On a path of sullen vulnerability.
It’s life, lived long and wisely,
Suddenly bereft of mortality
When the madness
Of humans filled
With bitter engorgement
Rots the roots
With bile and pitiless pestilence
Wrapped in garbage babble
With overwhelming constancy.
So, I approached Janus
With a smile and empty hands.
He saw my predicament,
Stood aside,
And pointed the way.
I passed quietly through.
Screaming Eagle Uncorked
Loss of the temporary
Has monsters built
Has a slip off the tongue
Right past the lips
Has built a wrought-iron gate
Opened only when, in one’s and two’s
The cows pass through
To leverage their milk
For a cotton dress
Without sweat stains
Or blemish from the fields
Where the grass can no longer sprout
To feed the laborers
Who stand outside
In passive posture
Until the thoughtless men
Need more cattle and pears
To seed the ground
Before the busy buzzing bankers
Sign the last minimal
Money
Duly laundered
Into the air
Of salient arbitrage
Updated in milliseconds
To the glory
Of ephemeral mass production.
Quietly, behind the dense marble walls
Crystal glasses are raised to honor Bacchus
That dulled the minds and bodies
Of the merry multitudes
Who stockpile outside the sturdy gates,
Forever entranced.