judas speaks (fragment)

You skip ahead, skip ahead,

to walk among the dust and raise up the dead,

always over-head of us; can't ever buy bread.

Now hunger kills me, you skip ahead,

skip ahead - burn your bridges - wake the dead.

monastic

I can feel the wait-time withering me -

it's the sum, the reel-rhyme,

the distance of that Atlantic

sea, that hole of whole blue and whole

green, the water I can't tread

or love or see. The time ticks,

turns at its fastest, slowly -

I sit with the night's clock,

sleep - dream memories and green

with slow growth, slower patience;

read Kerouac, at intermittent stays -

he's either too high

or too low - Buddhist? - for me;

but I like his simple monastic happiness -

it's like you, out there. Singing.

Rev. 8/9/10

she speaks

Sometimes,

freezing on the

on-ramp of an

interstate, you just want

the warmth

and nothing but

elsewhere, to flood

through your chest

and your hands,

to get yourself

to the other side

of the looking glass

between you

and the whole

fucking world.

To cover you

like your sleeping bag

can't. Maybe just

to hide in

another darkness.

To not piss

in the rain where

the ice-wind

cuts your legs, cuts

up inside of you

where no one

should be you don't

want.

Sometimes that's

all you want -

the warmth

elsewhere is;

might be . . . impossible to tell

with all this

shivering.

not inscribed by will

"I'm puzzled, not emotionally but logically, by the contemporary determination of women to write as women. Puzzled because this seems an ambition limited by the existing conception of what, exactly, differentiates the sexes. If there are such differences, it seems to me reasonable to suppose that literature reveals them, and that it will do so more interestingly, more subtly, in the absence of intention. In a similar way, all art is historical: in both its confrontations and evasions, it speaks of its period. The dream of art is not to assert what is already known but to illuminate what has been hidden, and the path to the hidden world is not inscribed by will."

- Louis Glück, from "Education of the Poet"

week end

You sit with no lights on.

The city hums. Not to you,

but to no one and

everyone here. The day's

small talk is done with,

and you're thinking about sleep,

sleep is on your mind.

Not small talk. You can only

take so much workplace

banter, even if it's all right.

A day skipping over the

surface takes more.

More than you thought.

Now only the night speaks,

the lights sparkle slightly,

the fridge sighs, the fan

squeaks. The one roommate

is asleep. You wait for

a couple more seconds,

think about a smoke,

but simply closing the

eyes sounds like

real pleasure, almost

like hope itself. You smile.

How simple hope is

at this hour, and how

utterly uncomplicated.

The old monks said:

Go to sleep before witching-hour.

But you're too tired for

witching or even wishing

for much, other than sleep,

maybe a sandwich, or a

good night kiss. But you're alone

and too tired for witching,

so you smile, listening

to the soft static hiss.

The city hums,

the lights sparkle.

You'll probably even forget

to brush your teeth.

The rain rattles you

after awhile, after so many days

of the grey

spilling over your windows.

Then, the sun

comes charging into the sky.

Things

look much better.

impediment culture

In Oklahoma I grew up with Indians.

Didn't know that they'd ever left anything

but Florida, which at the time

didn't sound that bad to me,
as hot as it is there.
In Smithville
we were all poor

as possums going through the garbage;

it didn't bother me or my

Indian friend Steven,

who could barely enunciate because

of a speech impediment

but learned to say fuck long before

it ever occurred to me.

I'd always pretended

to be a cowboy,

riding right next to John Wayne,

where heroes wore guns, not face paint.

(And the ones that wore face paint

were usually white guys anyway,

so what difference did it really make?)

You would've figured I'd have gotten

a better idea of how things had been

if how things actually were

was not the normal human shit

every little no-light town has to deal with.

The sun comes up. Goes down.

People are poor, drive drunk,

go to jail, die alone or they
end up "killin' themselves"
in the seat next to Vic Hopper's dad, mysteriously,

and no one cares -
there were drugs in the car -

because it's just "thugs killin' thugs," that's all.

And nothing about their color, nothing

about their color at all,

just the shit we were all swimming in,

and the stupid mostly-

white men running the school.

partum

I keep wondering -

when the shit finally gets out of my head,

where's it going to go? Who's going to listen

to my babble when you're gone?

When you're across continents and oceans

and I'm still here, taking the bus to work.

Who'll hear me

when I read something funny

when I get up in the night to piss?

(for lg and tc)

thoroughly persuaded

"No distance of place or lapse of time can lessen the friendship of those who are thoroughly persuaded of each other's worth."

- Robert Southey

the present

"And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep."

- Kurt Vonnegut, from Slaughterhouse-Five

"Of all nations the United States with veins full of poetical stuff most needs poets and will doubtless have the greatest and use them the greatest. Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall. Of all mankind the great poet is the equable man. Not in him but off from him things are grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity. Nothing out of its place is good and nothing in its place is bad. He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportions neither more nor less. He is the arbiter of the diverse and he is the key. He is the equalizer of his age and land . . . . he supplies what wants supplying and checks what wants checking."

- Walt Whitman, from the preface to Leaves of Grass

sensible of conditions

"On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. "

- Annie Dillard

(we are) the body

I cast your foundation like a stone.

I lost myself - moving from home

to unknown, to seeds sewn,

seeds wild and lovely, and perhaps not in wisdom;

but in beauty.

My self had dangled from your back pocket

like a rag-doll,

off the edge of your limericks,

your repetition and your rhyme,

your song out of time. Too long. Too long now.

I'll show you how,

and declare:

I dove into the deep when I dove with her.

Now, right now,

to Hell with you.

You, you children of darkness.

William Blake will show you how.

Listen! Listen up, I'll say it loud!

Listen, you pirates of morals, you makers of locks

and locksmiths, you bastards, you blockheads:

I aim to bury you.

(Also, apologies to Emily Dickinson.)