It's Your Turn To Find Me (from The Songs Of The Erinnyes, Sonnets, Odes, and Elegies by Jay Noya, Brigantium Press)

1

It’s your turn to find me because the night’s coming
It’s your turn to wake and leave the bed shaking
And every thought turns into an occasion for regret
It’s suddenly an opportune moment for smashing a fist into a wall
That’s what it’s come to this grief and loneliness and evisceration
It’s your turn to stand by a window watching the winter moons
It’s your turn to lay a hand over your heart
And feel for something which mayn’t be there
It’s your turn to listen in the dark for a voice
That won’t crack the shell of your peculiar solitude
It’s your turn to wait with an ear to an old oak listening
A tree caged in irons and tucked out of sight in a back street
A tree festooned with urban misery and alienation
Languishing as something forlorn and useless
Boxed away by fenced cement lots bordered with rotting weeds
A place where rats thrive and cats yowl and hiss and fight
And dogs snarl and bark and howl through the night
It’s a place where seldom seen tribes of vagabonds
Have erected tents and fly standards and drink and sing and quarrel
When the full moon rises and even when it’s pitch dark
And in the daytime skyscrapers bend over it and block the sun
Come to this old tree in its iron cage in penitence and listen for
What it won’t provide and won’t betray
But stand beside it and stare at it and something’s certain to shift
And you’ll remember something
Because you’ll have recognized faces and voices and songs
By this old tree in its iron cage
A tree festooned with urban misery and alienation
There’s a white-chalked line of warning
To the gaping precipice beyond the fenced cement lots
With its rats and its weeds and its dogs and its cats and its pigeons
And the tribal flying standards and the tents of the homeless

2

It’s your turn to see my face in other faces everywhere
It’s your turn to lie in bed staring at the ceiling
Because one month has gone into another and another
And years blur distinctions and the hours
Have turned into silent and deserted street corners
And your heart isn’t anything but a blood-pumping instrument
And it’s all because the night won’t end
And you can’t make sense of a verse in Ovidius Naso’s Tristia
And it’s because it’s the morning you’re waiting for
And when the morning does arrive
There’ll be a corpse to contend with
Nothing can be the same after that

3

Masses of black clouds are piling up to the East
And the dawn may not slip through this time



© J. Noya, 2006