....From The Tree Of........................Isolation & Thought
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_______________________________________________________ In The Crosshairs Off with rubbery covering of skin, off with everything, the hair that hangs like Spanish moss, the hanks of feminine promise- perfumed, curling like there's gentle softened thoughts inside this head, when there is nothing of the sort. Off with lips that are always opening, but look where a flock of sharp beaked killers wait to launch themselves in uproar, feathered in fury. I have turned against my kind. I'd watch my step, I really would, this is no dollface-cooey-coo, I am a kamkize coming in with murder in my eye all systems go---the most dangerous person on earth is the person with nothing to lose and nothing to prove and nowhere to go but at you. Ticket To Ride As much as I deny it .......escape makes sense. To slip from under the grinding file of life that sands each twenty-four hour block, till the mouth is full of the noxious shavings, nothing to show for it but a mounting dune of gun-metal gray--I can see why the married man turns to the shop girl with nervous, turgid thoughts or addicts snort their ten-minute heaven, or gamblers throw their last ten spot at a long-shot horse: the lights, the crowd's adrenalin. Home-stretch castenet hooves seem worth the risk compared to dominoed days, that wait to fall on their brothers. A road black white black white, blurred to a kind of paste, a rope of waste and connect the dots, until the the doctor says it's this or that, and you're left with the only completed thought- the one that ends with the sentence, "That's it, that's all, it's over. Period." Cooling Receding isn't the problem, recession of me from life, but the feeling that I stand still and life itself pulls away is what I've begun to notice. I enter a room, a conversation and I can see the back of me in shadow, while the noise and movement the color of people is sucked away out of range. It's strange to feel the slide and do nothing about it. I feel I'll do nothing until the day I die- and the dots ahead, like Seurated ............... daubs will be people I loved or thought I did somewhere some time, some painting once. The reactor is shutting down. It's like falling asleep: the hands go first. How Now I am the cow whose teats have gone hard and dry the one who isn't Elsie anymore, but a rogue and surly thing kicking up the pasture clods trampling all the daisies -scratching my neck against a tree to get rid of that damn bell that keeps tabs on my whereabouts so I can roam to places no one pulls at me to give them what they need, warm and regular. Pang I ride a ribbon of slipperiness. It loops from limb to limb. Few know where I have been; I am the connection up between the legs, playing in hair, rolling down socks, slipping through locks and gazing long at people sleeping on their thorns. I give them quarter turns from left to right so they can feel the pricking of their skins. Creep into empty kitchens, rattling pots for what is not inside: I am the hunger comes at night, and you would know me if you saw me. Shook Wind came last night shook the house loose, rattled the windows, rain like marbles shot from the sky a giant scattergun wake up, wake up's what I heard to what I couldn't say but it was loud. A night of nearly sixty degrees, November anomaly makes me think the world is ending world we know slunk off in a warm disquiet birds found shelter in the eaves or deeper parts of trees where they held like hooks- I need some hook hands, gripping life. Believing In Magic What did we do before modern medicine turned us into chemistry equations-- made plasters out of mud and leaves. Saw magic in the moon, the letting of blood. Applying leeches, special rocks from places of power that would give us back to health; we stretched our faith and our imaginations to worlds of whirling mystery and chance- it seems to me, sitting here, waiting in the smell of disinfectant a better way. Corraled The calmer I try to be, the more my heart will Appaloosa at its rib cage kicking the balsa bars, the light and curving bones of self containment. Mustn't scream- cardiac shriek's all I can manage: a blood curdle being squeezed by a fist sized pump that pounds the minutes. Hole Immer essen always eating this and that your head and eyes this night this perfect ly emp ty night- hungry as hope. Reverberations The dead lake reeds are poking up. Stroke sky. The drowned man bobs below. I cannot see his face, but know the way his arms wave, caught in current, long held on goodby, we drift and drift with sounds. I grab the edge of wind and won't let go. It comes for me with lacy voices, tatted throughout, commingled high and low, the fluted notes of grandma's whooping, knee-slap laughter, mother's Chesterfield gravel-grinding words I barely heard. An undertone, a hum beneath the tremolo of my babies' remembered hunger anger; it harrows me still to hear it. My once husband's voice: the thing I loved the most, the way the phone felt in my hand and held mellifluous brown and orange, serge, sienna burnt and rubbed into my ear. I hear the truth, the disguise of all my life in every cloaked and moving fog with wind inside- there is no name for this. On To Page 7 .............. Return To Contents This site sponsered by 
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