Thursday, January 06, 2005

Posted here Thursday, January 06, 2005 at 9:26:22 AM       1/6/2005 1/6/2005 Iraq and Tsunami   I give my gift to you My life I give The metal of the bursting grenade Enters my body, my soul Blood, scattering flesh Brain bursts Heart sags My marionette limbs Spread noodles on the ground This phallic Made in Tennessee I read on the internet A woman who came to work A few months ago Watched TV and Bush Sweat flowed off her dripping husband As the bed shook And breath Oh to have another breath My Lungs shattered like spilled popcorn Her breath picked up speed Sperm and deed And at work recalled All thought back None forward To imagine Entering me Releasing me From hope Fear I give my gift My life On a dusty road Last glimpse of Others ripped too We are to be Unremembered Togeth…   I give me gift This life This flesh This beautiful skin The quick water Rose up Like a man over a woman And more and more Like a heavy breeze with a load of anger Hit like a fist And my body yields Learned standing on earth My father my mother my childhood to water to instinctive swimming Head back for air But water Sun and sea Day after day Shimmering  fish Nets repaired Need to get to the market Nose full Taste of salt This is the food of death Don't swallow My wife my son I swallow Eyes open In swirling mud and sand mother Sounds of all sounds Enter my ears I reach In the whirling Submerging Down Crash against Something dull hard Unconscious of me I yield My gift My only Life Allah Somebody Grab me I gi…. Everything...                 ********

	Saturday, June 05, 2004

Posted here Saturday, June 05, 2004 at 9:30:48 AM       Politics   Old folks say past 55 Feel still alive and hopeful That what has happened will Be helpful to the future And deeply recognize How profound is Merely getting by Surviving So many haven't, More than all the fingers and toes. The resonance of language, the Recognition with each new place, new face new thought This path has been trod Before. The Younger of us Look ahead And treat the older as if we're dead Full of anticipation Of love or dread Success or mess It never occurs that was has happened Might be answer to what is to come. Even the reweaving of old thoughts Turned cliché Mixed with hard words Fuck this shit and half exposed tatoo Feel new and vital and wedgy Into the hazy horizon Of the next moment. Thus older feels conservative Something to conserve As Younger feels progressive With lots to observe. The wise know these diverge In order to converge Make whole The dying The living The not yet. ********

	Friday, March 26, 2004

Posted here Friday, March 26, 2004 at 9:14:25 AM     poem our language Our language Phrases like stones polished in the flowing streams of thoughts bursted out in speech Phrases in words That Caress our throats as we caress the air Pushed from our lungs What I say we both hear In shared objective Subjectivity. We must bless each word And honor the uses made In anger, hope, guile, Or just saying "hello" Short for "hell not be over you" And "good bye" "God be with you Until I can again look you in the eye" And all the other words whose Mud earth gut origins Have been left behind in bath after bath Of use And repression Leave us Still the word Pearled in use Polished But still serviceable. As you utter Let the thought sink Into the recesses of your body And come forth more resonant With human feeling Animal feeling Tide and storm and spring Feeling Made into honest art As you speak to one You must love Because they can hear you. ********

	Wednesday, October 15, 2003

poem Posted here Wednesday, October 15, 2003 at 9:26:52 AM     WE who living die We who living die We do not get death correct It is not to those who go direct But to us who remain To feel the pain Of the other's oblivion That reduces us to nothing Crushes our ego Dwarf's the body and its skills Occludes from us the distant hills The joy of refreshing Trapped as we are in narrow regressing Bathed in tears, still advancing in years. Death is a fact for the living left behind Not those to whom it was rather kind The sadness at their disrupted projects Is ours, not theirs. Yet death we like to think, is unfairly blind. ********