STEVE FRAGALE - A LITANY OF BEGGARS

Steve Fragale lives in Phoenix, Arizona with his family and works in IT.  He has been writing off and on for over twenty years. He has taken several academic and creative writing classes over the years. He's always been more drawn to longer forms of fiction, novels and longer travel essays, but poetry continues to be his first love. He finished his first  Novel, Waking Up, about a year ago and has since also completed another novel which he started over twenty years ago. He also has written over three hundred pages on a new novel. He also enjoys travelling, art, and discovering new authors.

A litany of beggars
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A litany of beggars line the street
The sun sharpens its claws
Fangs of water poured from a cistern glimmering
Dirty hands with dark stains
Red windows in eyes
Walls are a graffiti artist’s den
Splattering’s of colors drip down hot cement
Small fingers glide by and
Eyes diluted by hunger and brown skin
Opaque brilliant blues, red, and orange are smeared across the city
Dust storms, and violent winds but no rain with
Long meandering alleys
Smooth walls
Small steps
Inclines and wires and windows
And elegant doors with bars
And sharp mango color
Like pudding pouring from the walls
And the sky is alive

II
A man in turquoise robes and a white turban and white beard smiles
And sits down on the curb shuffling through old postcards
A girl sits down beside him
The city is awash in Hoods, turbans, and scarfs
And hats and spiraling beards and white hair like sharp teeth
Papers filled with documents filled with understandings are raining from the sky
Mystics and Holy men are praying inside glass
Thrown into the ocean and drowned with trash, debris and
Pollutions of rotting fish and skeletons
The way everything is unraveling in blue smoke is beautiful
Sound is splintering crashing tumbling inside waves of light
Black and white and time is drawn like a noose around a neck
Trees are broken like the veins of a river
Nothing quite fits together
This movie is a strange life with no ending and no beginning

III
Look around the corner she is wearing a white shirt with long sleeves and her dark hair is pinned up and the man hides his face with glasses  behind an old tattered book and a chef from a nearby restaurant is shouting with a heavy foreign dialect that he needs more cilantro
She imagines green mint, a weeping willow, and a caterpillar crawling over a green leaf beneath a domed sky which imagines glass, unraveling
She lays her head to one side which causes her hair to fall across her face as she looks out the window that is smudged with fingerprints as a slow drop of rain runs down the windowpane layered with black and white her nose touches the glass and then her full lips cold smooth good gone
In the back of the room there is classical music playing and in a dark corner sits an ebony piano with its cover closed and a wine glass half-filled sits on the top and in back of the piano hanging loose on the wall is an enormous painting of a clock with sharp hands like knives waiting to cut through the air but never actually moving only imagining motion
Signs are closed, cardboard abandoned and wood burned in brine
The sound of the waves can be heard in the streets, in the stores, factories, offices, and the salt is everywhere in everything, sand is time savage with fraud, in the movie theaters little waves slap at the feet of the audience, a minaret of sand, foam, seashells-time is a savage ruin-a seashell ensconced in a spiral of networks
The hourglass is splintered like wood about to crack and bleed
She is fascinated by spheres, conical shells, loops in time, and ripped film tape
He eats his lunch every day at his desk in tin metal containers and after lunch he brings them down to his car and sits them in the passenger seat, careful-he is studying ecological substances and digital interference and the effects the sea and salt is having on the city
After an infinite series what should we do with the brain? What should we do with the ecological metastasis?
There is a shovel leaning up against a red brick wall with thick dirt and mud sticking to the sharp metal point and staining the wall and at the bottom, on the ground lies a caramel thick rope with strands of hair splintering from the thick tight knots
Divisions are not static but rather liquid and full of movement
There are black tattoos covering her entire body and some are serpents, some birds, insects, fish, and others words trailing across her skin in ancient texts Chang, Quan, Hindi…her nerves in shadows and her eyes painted gold. Her revolution is near.
A litany of beggars cross the road, bare feet, sharp claws, tattered clothes, missing teeth, tangled hair and beards, broken glass, dry mouths, painful limbs, young and old, together.
Two girls, sisters possibly, sit holding hands, their hands are dirty with sand and splinters under their finger nails and the smaller of the two has sticky hands as she retrieved a half empty bottle of honey from a trash bin and the taste of the honey still lingers in her mouth. The other girls doesn’t like honey or anything sweet, she tells herself that life is too bitter for sweets. They sit with their legs resting in the side of the road with their legs touching.
The spool of thread begins to unravel
The pebble is crushed beneath concrete
Ripped film tape lies scattered on the ground like fallen leaves under dead trees
Tiny pools of mud where microorganisms swim struggling with tiny fibrous membranes and thick globs of blood secreting inside molecular veins
Language is dying or ripped, tattered, bleeding much like the earth and its torn umbilical cord hanging between its legs dotted and scarred
DNA has been ruptured
Flocks, swarms of birds have taken over the cities, diseased pigeons, crows, blackbirds, hawks, owls; they attack small children and pets
There are dead fish washed up on the side of the streets and fish bones cover the sidewalks
A litany of beggars line the street,
They are taking over the world

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