A templed thought

A templed gaze
A templed thought
A rhinestone in the eye
of enlightenment

This temperament
cannot be undone
by the narrow streets
of Granada

Those Guadix hill dwellers
live like luxurious moles
in the caverous hillside,
landscaped with limitless plains
spotted with red-hued poppies,
clumped with olive groves,
sweetened with lemon trees
and rimmed with grapes and, of course,
humbled with dirt, cheap cerveca
and with smoke

Far from St. Barbara, perched
above the Mediterranean strand,
like an Albatross atop the mast,
those weather-torn relics
of ambition and distain
remain lost in plain sight,
in a sunlight like no other,
one perfumed with coconut oil
and wine

The masses amass
mischievous missions
prepping the day,

Giving way to the night,
these mercenaries represent
cataclysmic shifts in thee -
systematic abuses of the body
to benefit the soul

Your Buddha can find
no space, here nor there,
His Pine wants for not
among the crooked streets
of Granada - wild, urine-soaked
and fine in the sunrise that licks
the snow-coned mountains,
where musical caves precipitate
tired moles - once howling,
raving and mad,
now quite as the light

The dawn may silence
the Gypsy banshee, but only
for the hours others take up,
offering their pine bows
to passers-by,
hoping to trade fortunes
with the freshly bleeding
travelers of the night

Precarious gaze the
Egyptian harlot casts
just beyond the horizon
of her veil.

She squints through
the cloudy room
of opium smoke
and curses,

like reading a destiny
in the blood-red sunset.

She might speak,
but the sand dunes
have become her,

and her words are
but muted echoes,
all but lost in the wind.

I might have thought better,
than to troll my need
at this hour of day,

but alas
this thinking has done me
no good.

Somewhere deep within
her pyramid gathers
the wine-soaked men
who have fallen over her.

She receives them
with moist tenderness,
even in the throes
of her drought;

but no feeling
is stirred.