having as much
as them. Men
don’t want to compete with
women.
I’d be content to be unspeaking
dead if
you’d have let me in! Until you
do
I can only work
to kill you back.
We’re almost equal in combat
I’m subjective, but you’re a
hoax.
Completely made up
body of
your competences:
your face is plastic.
You can see how it wavers
Your head that
squishy mass—no second
body for you—
A head’s
squishier if it’s blasted open.
Don’t you just want
to clean that up? Scrub
our brains off the floor? So
your daughter
can maneuver her dress
through to her
perfect school.
I was trying I was trailing
No, you weren’t
there, gentle aren’t you?
After I hear my own screaming:
I’m in a time
compromised, I
meant to say
comprised, oh I
meant! But time got
hypnotized
at the mercy of a power
which I am granted
by myself, by the entity
below
the dreamer: this body escaped
time like any poem
Are we breathing? I’m
not.
They photograph us primitive
women
weeping, shouting, waving
signs—must want to be
seen in that frozen
era. You’ve three times killed her,
one for the photo
one
for the body and one for the
boding your
ethics love, that fear of me
catching up to
you
and look!
Here I am! an official dead
civilian!
Take an anti-depressant! I’m not
supposed to
know that. You
can say ziggurat—
can you say splat, clot, shit,
horizontal?
No leverage for drainage, can’t get the
blood down
the pipe.
So, no,
I’m not interested in
your soul.
Or those of the factional farts
everywhere
worshipping something: like you
worshipping what
you know.
How wrong it all is. But I’m
not. You a
soul who didn’t
couldn’t, the mark of your own
confidence
game. Protoplasm,
you are
no one
except he who horrified
sees me.
My song kills yours.
I always knew I’d be left standing.
THE WORLD I’M DEAD IN
I don’t remember what happened
in order,
Because there was no order
But the events had weight, and
feeling.
The World I’m Dead In.
Where am I unfounded mercury
too rapid the assessing of
One. (lifetime.) He doesn’t know where
it is. (world.) The scientific
command given over, too; I
let them have it all.
I need to find you and tell you but
I can’t remember the order of
events
Because “order” is different here.
The intermezzo swells
that I used to
know.
Do you like this death?
It’s a European kind of
world but the order—two
women are
studying oranges, the
color
while Brahms swells because
it’s after the end of
my century—in order, I’m
not dead, really.
The tidal wave’s part of this milieu
that you’ve always dreamed of
crashing over
the desert, millions of years
Where are you going,
to the California Palace of the
Legion of Honor?
Frankly you don’t need
consecutive order.
I sat starkly in the waiting room
waiting to be told I was dead;
Was this by executive order
Death was a blonde and wore a
black leather jumpsuit.
Her dog wore a black leather
dog jacket.
I had to pat the dog
As in From Now On.
In the hospital, near a
bland window.
Since the shattering of the mirror
along a way down, I’ve
thought of
identity as over. Yet this
Voice
reappears
as a force against
seduction into
the death voice of my
supposed
times.
The wind through no trees
there are none
in this quartier.
Singled you out deliberately for
a hatred
that was, it was said, in the racial
memory. What one might
want to
Destroy. Die out of. the racial
memory.
You woman.
Meet you again, at Le Corail
meet you inside
Dead world I am so alive in or
vice versa.
THE ARROW LUSTER
Pushing on
through
endless layers
of words—
‘to be my own master I warned you.’
This famous orchestra
conductor proposes
a vague intermixture
of the feminine
in his masculine
Because there’s no woman
in the room? What is he
talking about?
There is no
feminine/masculine.
There is what
I say.
Even insults
create grief:
it’s not enough
to silence you
by killing
your close ones in war
(with grief you won’t care
any more. Would this be
‘feminine’ of you?)
Voice: Women are simply the best that
we have.
If you die soon, you may not have
gotten
everything you might have wished for
That could happen to anyone
It’s chancy to be a poet. We only
insulted you when
you misbehaved or weren’t up to our
standard . . .
Do you remember when you were
asked
to stop reading your poetry onstage
three years ago—
You had supposedly exceeded the host’s
time limit—
The genius who’d earlier read a poem
comparing his phallus
to an artichoke?
Do you remember the famous poet, drunk
(you’d written just a few poems then)
who, in front of a roomful of people, asked if
you were wearing “any underwear at all?”
Fell red-faced down on the floor
beside his wife’s feet.
Killed himself some
years later.
After I’d writ
ten “White Phosphorus,”
an elegy
for my brother the veteran,
a man presumed to tell me
what white phosphorus was
as if I hadn’t written the poem.
This man hadn’t been near the
Vietnam War.
EMOTION AS STRUCTURE
Delete most of the list
of insults accumulated
during lifetime as poet.
Allright;
They’ll just call you a
complainer
And nothing matters now.
Emotion, defined as an outburst
and not the structure of
his acquisitiveness,
has led to a logic of
domination.
It is not emotional to flash
one’s artichoke
It is emotional (not factual) to write
an elegy.
I went down there and saw the figments
again. The most beautiful thing I can do.
Has no relation to
sympathy for you.
A beauty reason falls into
place with, glowing
the sounds between the vocal sparklets. . .
The ingenuity that could have been its own
reward he wanted
to kill you off
with, buy you off—what’s the difference?
He has lost it; it’s mine.
THE COLOR OF ALTARS
Someone’s dying, an unjust failure
“Didn’t do right” says a stick.
Night after night I’m asleep.
Another one leaves when I wake up
He’s dead, right? Yeah—kind of nuts
changed all the brown figurines.
They have labels; can’t read them
It was my generation
this home was my church, am I
going away
Everything’s so brown
The color of altars.
Trying to remember the happiness
of numbers, I was. If you were a cipher,
without identity, filled with bliss a worker
among workers: could understand that?
A reddish rounded metal shape, the face, it
was so modern. The ones who railed
against identity always had a position—
more than opinion; a professorship, even a
chair: was the furniture talking? I hated
that, so I had an identity. Felt bad about
hating, then the century changed. He was
still more or less in place; and I was just crazy,
in society, what was that? A gun, pointed at
its own head.
Trying to remember, I was.
You’re not supposed to say it, so I-ishly
Who else has been around for ages?
A new pronoun: shithead . . .
It has taken me 59 years to achieve
this quality of perfect desertion.
The silliness of the Kingdom.
Go, stay, whatever. I’m
the possessor of the language;
what difference does it make
where I live?
. . . mad at me because she
thinks I’m belittling
my (our) country; as if I might
value her opinion: I’m allowing
her to represent everything I
can’t have time for, like countries.
Now it’s amber-colored insects
dense in a layer stretched all
along the ceiling of a hallway.
I follow this overhead pathway
to a room where a woman
had fit together insect pieces
constructing a voice to trap me,
lure me into the amber stratum;
into a death, and it almost worked
we almost managed to kill you,
she says, but we didn’t have
enough stuff.
It has taken me 59 years to achieve
this quality of perfect desertion
I didn’t leave you; didn’t even
put on my jacket.
But have no choice but not to die
There are different ways not to die
the one that has chosen me
is not popular.
As you see
these ancient ceramics of
fishes
gradually become
more transparent but also more
fiery
a handprint of fire or if
blue, iridiscent—why
are you leaving
when I’m explaining in the
style of a poem
how this art
progresses over the
centuries
as if I’m its maker,
always?
I didn’t leave, I never leave;
you leave
who can’t stay the poem.
Any word
will not desert me
I know, the figment says.
and everything old brown as in
the legend
I have achieved by
suddenly coming alive
out of a fish fossil—it was
dangerous, and is, whatever I do
from now on.
EVERYDAY
In the call for you, do you . . .
“I gave you . . .” someone begins.
Words call
and figures who wish to move
“I gave you. . .”
Everything’s supposed to be a
debt—
Doubt
that
Preordained because of the
buildings you walk
between.
Centurions
escort me to the tomb of
I gave you.
Consent to
be
a mythological figure
Greek or cinematic
Sure.
Ma, or grand, latinate
my love. I love you (I gave you)
It has finally become only
language. Where are my
words? An example,
behind the arras at Arras; the
difficult situation is avoided
by having the woman at
the tomb be one of the three
nudes in Cranach’s The
Judgment of Paris. She is,
in fact, Dido. who wasn’t
one of them. That doesn’t matter.
There was something I had
never seen before
twisted green
a torsolike life thing
floating
in a tunnel. Nobody wanted it.
I think it’s beautiful
Might be alive
entered the food chain, night of
survivors
where I turned and begged, in
states of soul,
to be released from mere daily life
again.
You
could die alive rag people,
in a
torn
terrain, no blossoms. Signs
theirs each’s meaning fell into
place
He says it; then you. released
back to jammed up
speakers. Screaming/stifled
you can find something even more
fallow/fetid/
fallacious, if you succeed
if your language
sticks to the formula
that wanders about the city
sweating glue.
The form I’d never seen before
makes its way towards
me.
Existing it can be
logically
existing
imploring,
I am the real
Dido,
I founded a city
I am still doing that
behind the tapestry
of me
as lovesick
suicide
Help me find my
voice (city, my voice is
your
city.)
FROM TESTAMENT OF THE GHOULS
Death was blonde and wore a black leather jumpsuit. Her dog wore a black leather dog jacket; I was commanded to pat the dog.
If you pat the dog, you become a ghoul. You are then playing by different rules from the living living; you do not adhere to the city’s established narrative sequences. You aren’t in that book, you’re in this one, where you are unconscious.
Don’t you know you’re unconscious right now? No?
I patted her dog, who’d come near me as I lay on a hospital bed by some bland window. It’s that dog, it’s always that dog—I know it means her.
Sure I had one of the viruses. So far so normal.
It is a planet of disease. There are many many viruses, affecting the organs selectively. The viruses come from everywhere, and there are more each year. People die, perhaps as many as are killed in the genocides; so there are always more ghouls everywhere.
The ghouls speak in “poetic” language, because they are souls whose stolen lives have been “prolonged” by the poetic within them. The only aspect of the human that hadn’t been analyzed and “understood.” As people lost interest in it, it secretly became them. It is all that lives in one; but what if I am wicked—that is a poem. You are alive and can’t die. Do I know I’m alive. You are unconscious while you read this.
Everyone is connected to a war somewhere, possibly to an ongoing genocide. Who sweeps the graves?
Each country has a primary city; maybe two or three; it has a king-twit who oversees the army. If the king-twit is elected, he is the elected commander of the killers he may assemble if he so chooses. So far so normal.
Songs and Stories of the Ghouls Page 10
