death and poems are a kind of lying.

so i'm dead and wouldn't you know it, all these strange sounds? 

Some with tobacco breath, some drawing in drink

like I could C a little child's charm.

I heard they didn't know me, deeply, wrong again,

superimposed, sitting on a stairway to Gaza , being full of

liberation

with a bowl of maple leaves, like corn flakes with old milk

at my feet, opening external, extrinsic, "it's God speaking"

the pastor says

But the universe has no use for the individual. Best to give 

your books to the crematoria / your reasonings to

external suffering. Say it ain't so alphabet>

When I was little, cladding and clay praising dirt,

I would make mounds and in those mounds

I stuck sticks for hands, little rocks

for eyes and from that philosophy I ask

greedily: do not ask me about the things

of this world, the substance of your dreams

just tell me of the inbred doing their death dance

with synonyms that let stand those giant stones

at the entrance

where a naked Lazarus clings to life,

Do not be held down or bent over and broken.

Do not pray if you are grown and did not attend

to the gravesite . The young will try not to

step in goose s**t while the old, high on that

wisdom stuff that the ancients

moved around with their cultural tongues, their

spiritual legacies. God, they say , can move

his finger in the sky of contrast;

can pull from his groin ingravescence. When I pray

I peek through my weeping. I died, from having

to drag around this love that I smoked down

like meth on the hot foil labyrinth/ dehydrated

like a fish in that contraption I got Mom for Christmas or

in the bottom of the bottle you've tossed in the river

by it's root. Entering the house where we once stood, i've 

taken it out of the burlap bag where the snakes

peed in shadows and without even thinking

I offered it to you. And you offered it back. 

Reviews

[jacob erin-cilberto]

When I was little making those mounds out of mounds....life was so simple...I always hoped I could be Lazarus and come back from the dead when I died...but now I just want to go into that tomb and stay there.
The world itself feels like a gravesite...Mom and Dad are gone...Christmas lost its meaning...and love I offered in my life was offered back, with no return.
Such interesting writes you produce...so many layers which allow me to explore, like a virgin cave no one has been in before.
Excellent poetry, as always, dana.
j.

[h d e rushin]

thank you my dear friend.....summer has returned to Michigan in May. Not my best season to say the least....but always thinking of your great poems while I sleep........dana