Yawdim Prelude

Isn’t it backwards this somehow street

Full of sometimes demons who live on repeat

Yawdim, Yawdim, your people are praying,

An in-between people, exiled to

A liminal wasteland for countless years

Groping like blind men, lost in the dark,

Relentlessly praying for an anything spark

University Avenue, it is thee the lamps light

Lamps, light the dimway through an everblack night

Light the city’s arteries, watch the blood cells roam

Till they gather at the gash through Old Rondo and bleed,

Bleed by the light of the sirens and lamps

Not a people to live in vein,

They will live their best lives before youthfulness wanes.

First of the month. Folks pilgrimage west

to visit the oracle they deem the best

He cuts the cheese pizzas and smokes a blunt,

He bathes in the smoke and discerns the lord’s will

And these words he offers to Yawdim’s elect:

“On University no one has a degree,

And the good worship backwards four times out of three,

Rorrim, Rorrim, on the wall,

Give us a reason to live like we care.

Give us truth tangimensional

And love past compare — ”

Here a bespectacled fool interrupts —

“What does god look like?” The crowd erupts, the oracle cackles:

“God looks like you, only opposite, see...”

But the man with the glasses will never see

And so glancing around the lobby, he

Gathers his people to join in his song:

A bus driver, a Somali, a woman in bedclothes,

Together they sing to the sons of the liminal:

“Come widmay, Midway, let’s dance through the dark

Let’s live like the lightning and forge our own sparks…”