the bindweed

 

 

 

I appreciate the question but everything gives out.

The knee first, then the prostate,

or the prostate, then the knee,

I forget the order of self, with so many

facts obscure from the beauty of the land.

Pain is all the body can offer other than

a task on the assembly line makeing Chryslers.

It is as sweet as etymology but as worried

as the bee, pushed along by the slightest breeze,

from time to time like Chronos himself

would dare sit at our tables, eating

like an ancient god, our cheesewiz.

 

Time passes like pain or like Miles Davis

who wrinkled up before our eyes, or as a photograph

of someone beautiful, left out in the rain.

When what I thought was hail was just that old

maple tree dropping its scent-gland seeds

from the skys of helocoptic folkdance/

from the smooth shaven booties of gay poets/

disfigured by the cross and lost the

way a good dog is lost/with the stupid

dreams that he will return like the face

of a loved-one, with no more words than

before like a Odilon Redon painting with

the butterflies erased/ at the end of the

nineties when the calendar was so

hard to hold.

 

Secondly the heart gives out.Then the liver

and its veins. Then you need blood

from another person, unless your a

Jehovah's Witness, and function in

another realm, where blood is totally

unnessary and over time, one can live a

happy life without it/ until the mass

in the stomach can no longer be misunderstood

as just a bad morning, and the scans you said

were bullshit, was that movie of a breastbone

coming apart. And however you prayed,

or passed the transparent medium

of the chemical science alchemized/

or until all the precious stones have been

dug up and layed on your forehead;

 

your dying shall be a special one.

Transmuted from another life,

but dead.

Reviews

[Shmoke-Sifted Heftlande..]

man this piece has such an epic pulse/it waxes and wanes and gives birth and dies tragically between stanzas..it does not give up its final breath at the end, as the illusion implies..it's a powerful illusion, and it's probly necessary to pause for the length of the rest of the stanza that you eviscerated and chucked off a cliff...I'm an absolute glutton for your physiological historical references and the way you splice them with the otherwise mundane and it all comes alive. I know I should be depressed after reading these somewhat morose pieces of yours, but f**k it, the ingenuity and honesty is so hopelessly invigorating, there's absolutely no sense in fighting the exhilaration inferred by their mastery.

[Emily B]

i think john already said it all