Daily Archives: March 29, 2013

Casting Out

Get out, Michael,
butcher of God;

get rolling, Azrael,
librarian,
census monkey;

get gone,
jazz doctor Gabriel;

get missing, Raphael,
sculptor of bodies
and pimp to the stars.

Do not think
we have forgotten you,
Lucifer, big boy Apoplectic;

you either, the One
Jehovah in all your forms
and figures;

get moving,
host of Heaven,
lords of Earth, 
all the named, 
all the unnamed — 

somewhere in your midst
a nuclear bomb
is suckling a fatality teat,
Man is standing on 
Woman’s neck, and 
the grass and sea
are withering all around… 

yes.  We blame you.
We blame the stewardship
you claimed, the honor and glory
you brayed, the exaltation
you craved over all things
natural and unnatural,

and now after too long
we say

get going, get gone,
get missing, get lost, 
get thee out of the way of those
ready to bend a knee
only to the vast work needed
to rebuild from your ruin.

Maybe you can come back some day — 
humbler, less certain of every thing.
Maybe we will trust you then

but until then, if indeed
you have wings, 

you damn well
better straighten up
and fly.

 

 


Feeling Good

“Good,” he said,
“is so non-specific.
Say more about why
you’re feeling good.”

She stretched a clean leg
out, arched her back, felt
the calf cramp rock her
like a blunt knife entering,
then withdrawing, subsiding,
fading.  When she opened her eyes

he was still there.  “I don’t have to
say anything about it at all,” she said.
“The point of feeling good is to feel it,
not describe it.”  And she wished him gone
while she still felt good. 


It’s A Pathology, This Poet Thing

I so wanted an emergency
to inspire me this morning
but instead had to make do
with a full night’s sleep
and a good mood upon rising.

If I get hungry I can warm up
last night’s nutritious leftovers —
who cares if I have good pasta
for breakfast?  I could keep it to myself,
I suppose, although we all know

I won’t, seeing that I haven’t yet, ever; 
what did you expect?   I will write on food
for food, love, sustenance;
will write about how
sometimes anger fails me, and how

angry that makes me.  Hell, I can conjure
a crisis out of anything
and make it last long enough
to hang some art on it…puts me
one step away from a politician,

a journalist, a captain of industry.
Better, of course, to sit and be well
with the happiness. To see what comes
from tolerating contentment.  To not have
anything come of it.  Maybe

I won’t be an artist anymore,
or at least not for a bit.  I could learn
how to tolerate that without making it
a crisis and then writing about it, but
seriously, would I still exist?