La Loba (For Diamanda Galás)

I saw you sharpening your steak knives

on a streetcorner on Santorini

on sheer-ice obsidian

Hard as the Hellenic features of the

shrouded women of the marketplace

Sharp like the hastily hewn hexes

on the gravestones of Anatolia

Oh to have been a fly on the wall

Of that vertical house in San Diego

You and Dimitri

Honing your art like cocooned pupa

Before the blood ran, the pulse quickened
And the fearmongers fled in fear
As you detoured the dread to their doorsteps

Or to have been a bullet

in your double-barrel prayer

Who was the target?

Was it Gibby Haynes?

Forever surfing his precious butthole

Or Axl? – Fuck his axel but pity his tiny mind
A relic in his own time
Trampled underfoot by your companion cavalry

To have been the altar

For your Plague Mass

Or the X for your Shrei

Or the solvent

Leeching the lead from our zeppelins

Who would have thought

You could wash the misogyny outta that shit?

It’s never truly indelible is it?

Diamanda,

Don’t you know your brother

Is alive and well and living in the Sporades

With your friends Callas, Pasolini and John Lee

While you soldier on for us all

Yielding to the unbearable

Letting it course through you

'Cause nobody else ever would

La Loba
You with with the celestial shriek and electric soul

Sappho on the Mississippi

Or Olympias in the Ozarks

Soaking up the blood of our slain sisters
And wringing it out before our eyes and ears
Moving a million hearts in mono, stereo, surround sound
White noise, black noise, rivers coursing through steelmills
Poor old Johnnie Ray never saw it coming

Switch it on, Diamanda
Switch on those mics and let 'em have it

Forever the best

Of our better angels
Forever challenging us
To be just a little bit more alive