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FAREWELL TO A DOWNTRODDEN SAINT
--2/27/98
(For Jack Micheline)
don't much like this age
hankering after puritan taboos
holy/holier than thou
about everything
hail & brimstone Cotton Mathers
running my city, country
anything alive, x-rated
holy art not exempt either...
walk down any street & see
people huddled in doorways sneaking
a drag, scared criminal by
new morality: in the name of health, family
someone killed, a building blown up;
doesn't matter what we call it now...
nabbed for jay walking
refusing to keep within the lines
overstepping like a child who
doesn't see a line
crayoned red over a coloring book picture
& called into the principal's office
to explain what i couldn't
can't still...breathe between lines
i don't see: do not step
on the grass dance on the grass
like a child doesn't know
how to put herself in
a prison, child with young
or old skin who knows in
the scheme of things/no scheme:
refusing today to join the huffing pack
chasing down the POET'S death
with their writing tools,
i've taken this crazy detour,
will not even write his name
in defiance
in deference
i bump into the POET
seated in a crummy luncheonette
in my poem, coffee & a bagel
with a smear of cream cheese
out of his Bronx boyhood,
that old floppy hat he wore in
San Francisco, day i met him
and we spent together;
bumming a cigarette, he winks at me
smiling flowers & children
all over my poem
wherever he sees gray,
making a toast:
to life
to life
(someone is doing a broadside of this)
WHAT REMAINS
my business is words
but i've another language
my poems only approximate
a sound picked up
like my lover's scent
that spoke to me hours
after he left...
voice is what this language
is about
and touch and smell/that
lives in alphabet
and has none
COMING HOME
down St. Marks heading east
to clear my head of a week
no worse than usual/no better
streets jumping with crazy people
stalls of silver jewelry, scarves, bags
books outlawed by scared minds
radios jamming with each other
disordering every-day-sanity
i can think again, stop pretending
for a paycheck, an apartment outside
the city's war zone/ every cities:
CRIME DOWN, screams headlines;
a sniper's soul hides
in the safe neighborhoods/playgrounds
targeting free spirits: unreported
another sheep added to the herd...
down 3rd & 2nd avenues, Russian shops
fat cheeked ladies wearing babushkas
carrying long loafs, weighed down
by shopping bags, tired husbands
in whose faces, etched forever
my father's disillusion with this country,
better than one he left,
not the country he waited
three years in Amsterdam
for entrance, the daily struggle
for a paycheck every week,
fearing the worst: never came/
maybe worst of all...
down to first, not needing
to go any further head back
stopping into cafe della pace
for coffee, yes
and a scrap of paper
to recall who & why
in what country
this poet breathes free
WHEN THE FRONT ISN'T THE BACK TURNED AROUND
something wrong with uprooting when
the roots were
yanked up with that plant
flung across the room
this is wrong words mixing
with earth pieces of clay pot:
drunk as he was my lover knew
what was pulled up that night
wrong when there's nothing but
that great fleshy elm outside my door
this quiet back view the garden to miss;
returning to a front view apartment
out of control horns
sanitation basemen ultimating the
bottom line: cheaper rent...
returning to that urban jazz
i grew up hearing
in flatbush brooklyn accompanying me
when i left home & another home & another
is impossible...
i was born in this curtained room
behind the garden small candles burning
afternoons out my lover delived me
bore witness, my body proof
i never lived anywhere else...
but there's a plant
i'm taking with me
sprung from the seeds of
the one murdered
real as those jazzmen,
just as insistant
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THE SECOND TIME
"It's the truth even if
it didn't happen."
--Ken Kesey
He came with twenty Karat promises
to a woman whose poverty stirred him
like an old infant's cry...
He knew, this other woman's husband,
who learned to con fears in
the dark of abused youth
from pages of a woman's "don't
give a damn," held wisecrack,
how much she did;
trapped
in the undress of an artist's scorn
she vamped her body of work
before horny minds for
those lies; stillborn truth.
Driven by a man's Adam need
he voyeured to that place
she feared to look;
she saw a woman, like a costumed child,
laboring in the ring of
his wife's bondage
and couldn't refuse
what she didn't know to desire.
Loved her that much.
She knew too.
Even after learning
the counterfeit truth...
with her gut-mind knew.
But a woman no one could help
felt a rape force
tear hells deep: the
second time she
lost her virginity.
from NO-ONE'S-PEOPLE, New Spirit Press, 1992.
PROTEST
A door gunner in Vietnam
was flying toward a
woman he never met
brought up to fear
men who spoke with
their bodies; above all, flying.
...To California,
the lie of discharge papers.
Shooting up was shooting to kill.
Nobody gets out of war
that easily.
Grew up in range of marital fire
surprise ambush attack,
she knew about war,
friendly fire;
destroyed
for just being there, being you,
what they feared to be... just being.
Closer now. Still flying.
He escaped the enemy again.
Thought she did too
protesting war, shoplifting
in wild-talk cafes,
gypsy artist winged high
into third world country,
someone beside her
she thought was him.
Men's eyes slipped into her skin
across a room, kept them
by keeping distance.
In the tight bandanna of freedom
lived the life she wasn't ready for,
returned with stories.
Happened but didn't.
Once knew girls like her,
had all the answers. Taught him
the breathing of love...one did.
Noise of death made him forget.
Took cover in geographyless routines:
business ascent, the business
of marriage. Wake sleep skies
couldn't see where he was going
kept flying...level disturbance.
To find her
he had to become
her perception of him.
She dreamed of him who
would find her
where others failed;
slept off the solitude.
On a flight he couldn't afford,
knapsack of tales to prove it,
crash landed.
Mistress of lies still;
what did it matter.
In his vision of her
became
what she pretended to be.
Created each other,
made love like it was
the beginning of the world.
So it is.
SHE'S BACK, Ye Olde Font Shoppe Press, 1996
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