Let Me Explain

after Neruda Go ahead, ask: where are the pomegranates, the dates, the girls with skin brown as hash, the hash? Listen to what’s happening One morning bonfires began to leap from the earth, devouring human beings, lit by matches flicked across the sky with joysticks. And from then on fire, from then on burning hair, from then on limbs and meat. Invisible bandits, pickpockets from ten-thousand feet, faceless, thoughtless, dumb except for humming, bandits marked with tiny flags, controlled from continents away by children, child bandits with letter jackets left hanging in their girlfriends' closets, child bandits with bibles thumbed and highlighted, spear missiles through the sky to kill other children and the blood of children runs through the streets, neither seen nor heard, obedient, simply, like children's blood. Ask away: why doesn’t his poetry describe our urban loneliness, the body drenched in metaphor? There’s nothing to see here, nothing to see, just blood in the sand, blood in the streets, nothing to see.