Heat (edit).

[mnaz]

I write sad songs on cheap vodka;
clandestine letters to mortality.
My will to live is based on fear,
so I drank it under the table.

What is the exchange rate?
How many voiceless souls equal
one determined death trader?
Twenty well-paid scientists?

I limp from a cracked motel room,
gassed in a gothic hangover; the
heat of a black sun; exude my poison,
another bombing on the radio.

Prince Far I is cranked up to nine.
"Throw away your gun and mek be done"
No takers on this stripped ghetto rock.
The martial roots are blasting me.

Into Sonoran smoke and waver I go.
Heat comes on like faceless violence.
Fire is burning through the crust.
The land might not hold.

(originally written in Tucson, 7/7/05, after a London subway bombing. Re-written.)