My life
has appeared unclothed in court, death-bone by death-bone witness,
and I was shamed at the verdict
and was given a cut penny
and the entrails of a cat.
But nevertheless I went on
to the invisible priests,
confessing, confessing
through the wire of hell
and they wet upon me in that phone booth.
Then I accosted winos,
and derelicts of the region,winning them over into a latrine of my details.
Yes. It was a compulsion
but I denied it, called it fiction
and then I swallowed it like my fate.
Now,
in my middle age
I'm well aware
I keep making statues
of my acts, carving them with my sleep-----
or if it is not my life I depict
then somone's close enough to wear my nose ----
my nose, my patrician nose,
sniffing at me or following theirs down the street.
Yet not even five centuries ago this smelled queer,
confession, confessions
and you devil was thought to to push out their eyes
and all the eyes had seen (too much! too much!).
It was proof that you were a needle
to push into their pupils.
And the only cure for such confessions overheard
was to sit in a cold bath for six days,
a bath full of leeches, drawing out your blood
into which confessors had heated the devil in them,
inhabited them with their madness.
It was wise, the wise medical men said,
wise to cry Baa and be smiling into your mongoloid blood,
while you simply tended the sheep.
Or else to sew your lips shut
and not let a word or a deadstone out.
I too have my silence,
where I enter another room
and am not only blind,
but speech has flown out of me
and I call it dead
though the respiration be okay.
Perhaps it is a sheep call?
I feel I must learn to speak the Baa
of the simple-minded, while my mind
dives into the multi-colored,
crowded voices,
cried for help, I've no ******* on me.
The transvestite whispering to me,
over and over, My legs are disappearing.
My mother, her voice like water,
saying "fish are cut out of me.'
My father,
his voice thrown into a cigar,
"A marble of blood rolls into my heart"
My great-aunt,
her voice,
thrown into a lost child at the freak's circus
"I am the flame swallower
but turn me over in bed
and I am the fat lady."
Yes! While my mind plats simple-minded,
plays dead-man in neon,
I must recall to say
Baa
to the black sheep that I am.
Baa. Baa. Baa
Oct 15, 2015
Oct 15, 2015 at 12:52 PM UTC
I grieve and dare not show my discontent,
I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,
I do, yet dare not say I ever meant,
I seem stark mute but inwardly do prate.
I am and not, I freeze and yet am burned,
Since from myself another self I turned.
My care is like my shadow in the sun,
Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,
Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done.
His too familiar care doth make me rue it.
No means I find to rid him from my breast,
Till by the end of things it be supprest.
Some gentler passion slide into my mind,
For I am soft and made of melting snow;
Or be more cruel, love, and so be kind.
Let me or float or sink, be high or low.
Or let me live with some more sweet content,
Or die and so forget what love ere meant.
~ Elizabeth I
Oct 14, 2015
Oct 14, 2015 at 10:02 AM UTC
A drop of water freezes instantly -
My seven years and seventy.
All changes at a blow
Springs of water welling from the fire.
Oct 13, 2015
Oct 13, 2015 at 5:28 PM UTC
I have heard of fish
coming up for the sun
who stayed forever,
shoulder to shoulder,
avenues of fish that never got back,
all their proud spots and solitudes
****** out of them.
I think of flies
who come from their foul caves
out into the arena,
They are transparent first
Then they are blue with copper wings.
They glitter on the foreheads of men.
Neither bird nor acrobat
they will dry out like small black shoes.
I am an identical being.
Diseased by the cold and the smell of the house
I undress under the burning magnifying glass.
My sky flattens out like sea water.
O yellow eye,
let me be sick with your heat
let me be feverish and frowning.
Now I am your son, your sweet-meat,
your priest, your mouth, and your bird
and I will tell them all stories of you
until I am laid away forever,
a thin gray banner.
Oct 12, 2015
Oct 12, 2015 at 1:42 PM UTC
Three and seventy years
I've drawn pure water from the fire -
Now I become a tiny bug.
With the touch of my body
I shatter all worlds.
Oct 12, 2015
Oct 12, 2015 at 12:27 PM UTC