I remember reading
Martin Luther King, Jr's
Letter from Birmingham Jail
Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom
Mark Twain's Huck Finn
DuBois' Souls of Black Folk,
Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck,
Sherman Alexie's Part-time Indian tale....
For the first time

The words of Chief Joseph
Sitting Bull
Tecumseh
James Welch
and Alexie Sherman
And others of indigenous kind
Linger like arrows in my mind.

Of course, there's
Gilgamesh's forlorn quest for Enkidu;
Osiris, Amun, Ra, and Seth,
Homer's  Illiad and  Odyssey,
And Virgil's Roman treatment -
(For whom the gods destroy
We all must learn bereavement).

I remember reading
Milton's Paradises (lost and found)
And Dante's Infernal quest for Heaven
Through the bowels of Hell with Virgil's spritely guide
And up the Devil's staircase with Beatrice by his side.
John's Revelation of Times' End;
And LaHaye's money-making Left Behind,
Collin's Hunger Games and Dashner's Maze Running
Apocalypses enough to chill my mind.

I have surveyed Dead Presidents
Washington,
Jefferson,
Lincoln
Both Roosevelts, Ted and Frank,
And Reagan
And smatterings of others...
Then hopped the bookish pond to read
Sir Winston and some others,
Not the least of whom is Gandhi G,
Taught by the Queen to free his brothers.

I have studied
Moses
Job
David
Ruth
Esther
Isaiah
Jeremiah
The Disciples
Paul
and James
(Ironically,
Since Jesus is the "Word,"
Through men He penned).

British poets's thoughts,
Tale tellers long-dead
Have found their way
Into my head:
Beowulf and Chaucer
Old moral plays
Shelley and Keats
Cavalier Poets
Scott and Brownings
Burns and (not) Allen
Spenser and Shakespeare
Dylan and Tolkien
Lewis and Auden
And so many more
That I leave on the floor

Western Americana I have loved
Hemingway and Steinbeck, all worth the time,
Mari Sandoz' Old Jules, and
Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth,
Keroac went on the road, while
Joseph Kinsey Howard showed us the West
Lewis & Clark in journals scribed
Their journey west and back again

I can't forget psychology
And so I will digress
Or Sigmund's accusation stays
That I have but suppressed:
Ellis, Freud, and Eric Berne,
Pavlov, Skinner, Thorndike, Watson,
Wundt, and Wm James, Piaget and Chomsky
Then Vygotsky and Bandura put a social spin
on cognitive psychology, and Everybody's in.
Diverging and Converging, psychic students, all
Could never make transaction
'Til Rogers tried to make some peace
But Ellis wouldn't have 'im.

And then, of course,
The lighter stuff,
The popcorn of the mind:
Clancy, Rankin, Carole Keene
L'Amour  and Will James
Stephen King and Poe,
Cruz Smith and Leon Uris,
Grisham, Deaver, Cornwall,
Asimov, Bradbury and Herbert,
Carroll and Baum...

The list goes on and on, and will, I'm sure, expand beyond capacity.

Under frizzed hair,
The Conscious Operator,
Smacking gum,
Waits with her tails of living wire
To make connections
At Synaptic Central.  

The reader
Tilts a page to catch the rays,
Scans for symbols,
Begins to send
And to receive
Electric fires of thought
Traveling in from
Senses Five -
Traveling out from
Schema Library's
Data files -
To meet and
To commingle
At the Board.

With octopal finesse,
The tireless Operator
Plies Neural Central,
Sending quick myriads of thought
To rest or to revive in living files.

Neurons snap and arc;
Their coded leaping fires
Surge message-full
Through cables sheathed
To Synapse Central,
Where in her nimble hands
Fire Control finds slots
And coordinates connections,
During and Long After
The Outward Reading's done.

Even when the Blinds go down
Synaptic Central's work goes on.
The frizz-haired friend steps out to rest;
Sub-Conscious moves into her place
And with unsteady hand
Plays seeming havoc at the Board
Rearranging and Deranging
Delightful dreams, or horrid.

The Reader
Experiences Text:
Tastes the corners,
Chews the middles,
Examines the ideas,
Turns them over and over -
Lozenges to be mulled.

Unique to each Reader
The Text must pass
Each Reader's senses:
His eyes,
Her nose,
Their tongues...
And so begins Digestion,
A complicated process producing
pleasant dreams in one,
Nightmares in another.
Soothing sleep for me
Dyspepsia for you.

Ideas have their routes to pass;
The dross is left behind or lost
And what remains is fiber to our souls
(To steal Walt Whitman's term).

The Author,
Having said
What is to Say,
Submits the Text
And Steps Away...

What's to be Read
Or Heard
Or Seen
Is Said and Done.

Then Comes the Fun.

The Reader
Ambles In shuffling,
Struggles In fighting,
Bumbles In stumbling,
Forges In determining,
Skates In gliding,
Rides In on a horse named Fluency.


The Reader wears the Text:
Tries it on for size,
Shrugs before Self's Mirror,
Stretches,
Shrinks,
Dyes,
Preens,
Thinks s/he sees the Whole,
But cannot even see the back
For lack of some connection,
Then ambles off to share
The Text with others.

Later, at the Readers' Circle,
Each wearer of the Text,
Each Poem Creator/Holder
Whose individual Poems differ
After putting on the Text,
Compare.
And though they twirl and dance,
Though they stretch and pose,
Though they must adjust,
No one wears the Text
The Same.

I know what you are thinking;
I know what you were thinking;
I know what you will be thinking
When your end comes.

When the end comes,
I will be waiting
To pull you through into
Always.

Wasn't it I who pushed you,
Unaware and blinking
Groggily into the light;
Wasn't it I who pushed you
Forward into Time?

He had to come back.

On a December afternoon
when the sun was more to west,
he landed on the most favorite place of his house,
the roof.

Just as he had imagined
the still winter air was abuzz with life.

Doves were pairing for a home
Green bee-eaters swooped on insects
Two herons kept following the grazing cow
Crows were busy with twigs and wires
High up beyond where paper kites could soar
Storks slow sunned their wings wet from the jhil
The cats warmed their furs before the cold night
The stray puppy gamboled with its mother.

Each piece had perfectly fitted the other
including the silently sleeping house.

He was tempted to walk down once
has she changed any little way?

He smiled to himself
then breezed away from the roof.

What kind of man is this
To report his mother for begging him
To abandon hateful folly?

What son is this, so depraved,
Would shoot her in the public square
With jeering blood-seekers cheering?

What kind of god must this man seek,
To end the life of the one who gave him life,
To what end would such a god demand obeisance?

Perhaps a god this is,
Whose thirst for blood would raise
The dripping flags of war
And bathe the world neck-deep,
Up to the horses' bridles in gore,
But he's no god of mine.

This god is not the One
Who sent His only Son
To give His Life in the name of peace,
To save His friends and love His enemies.

This god is in rebellion,
Denying his own creation,
Lying to himself,
Reviling peace
Because it bears the image of
The One True God.

Enviously manipulating,
Beguiling the children of Eve,
Desecrating the human form,
Dividing the human race,
Heaping doom upon doom,
Calling damnation on himself.