Daily Archives: February 12, 2008

Gotpoetry Live tonight

Small but enthusiastic crowd, including happinesstogo all the way from AZ!!!!!

truthbealiar did a great set. Most of you missed it. Not that I blame you tonight, since it took me almost two solid hours to drive home from Providence, including the moments required to inch my way around a jackknifed trailer truck on 146. (This is usually a forty-five minute drive for me.) NO FUN. No fun at all. The roads are awful and getting worse.

Still…I do wish more folks would come out for the reading. It’s fun. It’s eclectic. And we miss you.


Poets For Human Rights

Just recently joined this community, owned and operated by the tireless Larry Jaffe:

View my page on Poets for Human Rights

Come check us out.


After

Once they strap you in the electric chair
it’s only a matter of time
before the lightning becomes your advisor,
telling you this storm is of no consequence
as you go into the Light.

On the other side, you find
no one. No God, no Devil,
no deity wild or tame, no resting place,
neither cloud nor flame. All there is
is a droning in the dark, a song that keeps you guessing

for hours, perhaps days or decades —
who is that chanting for?
Is it your dirge, or perhaps your accusation come to haunt you
for eternity? Or are the angels simply telling you
that murder is murder, no matter how many laws

are made to explain it away? You will sit there
wondering for what back home you’d have called “forever”
before you meet the reason you’re here. When he comes up to you,
whole again as he was not when you left him
on the street back in the life before,

you are briefly terrified until you recall that nothing more
can happen to either of you. He sits beside you,
and that singing envelopes you, you join in,
but these are not your voices!
What is left inside you after death cannot sing the way you sang in life…

here, you are brothers. You killed him, he died, and all
is forgotten as you sit together waiting for the ones
who sent you here to join the chorus. It is not
for you to understand how you came to be here.
All you can do now is sit, sing, listen, and wait.


Spectator

I picked up my laptop and threw it at the dark TV first thing this morning. Neither shattered; the computer splashed into the the tube of the Zenith and vanished. Surprised by the lack of noise, I got up close and saw it in there, hanging in space, spinning slowly.

It will get bored without me, I told myself. It will become tired. So I threw the recliner after it and soon the laptop was sitting in the recliner. Since there was no way for it to watch TV inside the TV, I threw a copy of Berryman’s “The Dream Songs” in there and soon there was a nice tableau of the silver Mac and the black book in the green chair — hard to see unless you are right on top of the set, but it is unmistakable, and so handsome in there.

But what do I do now that everything is inside the TV? (Turning it on is out of the question — who knows what that might do to them? I may be impulsive, but I am not cruel.) You may say I should go after them, but then who would be out here to toss in things they, or we, might need? I do not know if it works both ways, or if they’re trapped.

I’ll toss in a cell phone and wait for a call. But what shall I do while I am waiting? One can only take so many showers before one begins to wash away. One can only write so many poems before one longs to see them made into movies. One can only hope for so long before falling through the black screen.


Shit Epiphany

What joy to finally understand
that someday
we’ll have flowers growing
out of us, that
whether we become
ash or meat
it will happen one day that
we’ll all be green and happy
fodder, entering
mouths and departing through lower
intestines once
the blooms have dropped away,
and that means
we’re shit already even as we’re imagining
ourselves as future fragrance and
metaphor, even though we’re fated to be just
waste! It’s too good to be true,
we tell ourselves, that we will have such
a humble purpose.
We’ve wasted so much time and prayer
thinking we’ll be gods someday,
or hired hands of the gods, that when we finally see
that we’re individually of little value it’s as if
Jesus rose from the tomb and didn’t recognize us.
How comforting
to be at last forgotten and anonymous!
Once that’s over we can diminish ourselves,
cease fantasizing about our own
particularity as we secretly revel in knowing
that we’re just one of the innumerable warm left behinds,
ready at last to join the wide sea of
utility, to at last surrender
the folly of being so lonely, so
singular.