Belief

I believe in a world lived without the illusive poverty that is manufactured

to stretch our souls to belief through fatigue

to break our ukuleles on the knees of modern business

to make us drink ourselves to death beneath the shame of the everyday.

I believe in a street

that smells like childhood reaching in breaths

between the limbs of the weeping willow

mourning all our compromises,

celebrating our victories like birthdays,

holding our instrument to the moonlight in awesome rapture.

I believe in a city

not made by the sacrifices of the poor

hummed through with rapturous musics

and becoming the future by making art decide

our new designs.

I believe in a religion

where the people play like children all day long

beneath the orbitals of the cosmos, mapping

out new universes with the tacit understanding of love

as the stars unfold in twilight

the secrets of our wonder-struck ancestors

who drew breath despite sufferings,

who knew of the magic entrusted to the veldt of life

from the hand of the mysterious,

who knew not that they would lead to you or I.

I believe in you sometimes,

like when you refused your own arrest

and made the police chase you down a well-lit alleyway

to your undoing by poorly placed lemon tree.

I believe in your argumentative nature,

in your refusals against the disseminated idiocies,

in your soft whistle that marks the occasion of secret happiness

undertaken when nobody is looking

for the styrofoam man or woman you are supposed to be.

I believe we have sung too few songs together

beneath the old star-fires

for the angels to take notice in their ledgers

and consider us as friends

while the wars they gobble in gluttony the resources

known as our brothers,

while the villains design new atrocities

while our village refuses to make amends.

I believe that between us we could have found that street, that city, that religion

where the police failed to search due to a swelling of their terror

at the rarity of our harmony magnified

that made our feet escape the ground as we flew through out the air

into geographies mapped by compassions

and mountains marked by love affairs.

I am asking you out of this burden known as modernity

to take up rifles on the steps of any senate

to sew sonnets into bathroom graffiti

and to fall into the divinity known as love played without a care.