Odysseus (I think its finished...for now...)

A Hot Night, Odysseus Stands Before A Window

The sound of a trumpet, the call of a bull elephant

moments before the fabled graveyard is reached

and a pair of ivory tusks are earthly surrendered

as tribute to the weight of overwhelming yesteryears.

The sound of a trumpet, the cry of a heart

in the lost desert of night; a heart squeezed

between two dawns, blown apart by the memories

of footsteps trod on other people’s lawns.

Odysseus visualizes the trumpeter’s thick lips

pursed with pain that craves to be shed,

cheeks inflated, two walls trying to protect;

a sound produced - seduces the spaces

between the disks of his spine as he stands naked

in the night’s ambiguous shrine – low lights,

the distant hum of wandering beasts, the cry

of an unwell child struggling with the heat.

It is an implausibly hot night, the air

a lair within his head to catch thoughts

that should have been put to bed.

The heat makes everything unreal.

Trapped before the window - a mast

in the city’s ocean of night - unable to flee

or fight; the trumpet’s sound creates him,

berates him, calls him home

and away again as it pries apart his mind.

He grows fearful he might forget the King

He had become – decides the epitaph

will choose his choices that cannot be undone;

the actions, thoughtless and destructive,

that litter the waves like the sun-glinting bones

of lost sailors searching for landfall.

The city’s colours melt, merge, are bent by sounds,

by smells, by memory; the stars swirl bright, attack

the dark, like the trumpet, shake his faith

as he stands in the front of the open window.

The belated breeze hounds, the bricks spit heat,

his mind treads old sentences, merges verbs

to nouns, imagines a thousand possible excuses

that are swallowed before the lie is set to flight.

She stirs behind him – he remembers

it was originally her smile, then the way her right

hand twirled her reddish hair; the blouse untied

and spread and the nipple not yet erect, kissed

and as he flared he forgot the promise

and surrendered to the call of the beast.

He had hoped it was a dream,

that his standing before the window,

his right hand idling touching his limp cock,

was not…

That the picture he had tried to paint

as his life…had become…

that the trumpet was soothing

not The Siren calling him out again.

Will he ever rid himself of the torment

of that mast? Must he always succumb?

Never be able to resist the echoes

that, like waves, forever call him…

take him further away from the kingdom,

the children and Penelope’s open arms?

When did he breathe so deep that he inhaled

the desert surrounding Troy and now Its sands

reside within his lumbering lungs?