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You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to **** you.
You died before I had time ----
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My ****** friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You ----

Not God but a *******
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the *****.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two ----
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagersnever liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you *******, I'm through.
Everything in quotations marks and italics was written by TS Eliot.

eyes knowing glossy men,
sheer women, creatures,
not all artists, but artists,
always thus,
centrifugal, simple

from their core,
emanate, resonate,
expand the exterior
with interior precision sculpting

to the interior delve,
via brush or limb,
pen or music,
the exposition, the exploration,
the reconstruction of composing
one's self, creation and destruction
of your own myths

movement of arms and legs,
sparseness of simplicity
subsidiaries of centricity,
tributaries of complexity,
oriented to their locality

the simple purpose of inhalation,
to exhale, after transformation,
the calculus of thought into emotion:

"the tongues of flame are in-folded
into the crowned knot of fire and
the fire and rose are one"


the dancers hear the music:

"so deeply that it is not heard at all,
but you are the music
while the music lasts."


**”Quick now, here, now always –
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well"
"Immature poets borrow, mature poets steal." T.S. Eliot (1888 - 1965)

Inspired this evening by the Martha Graham Company, the words and wisdom of TS Eliot, from whom she took inspiration in her choreography of modern dance
i never have liked uppercase i's
i know it's absolutely stupid
but they always make me feel more important than others
like i'm always saying I, I, I.

see even that was weird
way too many eyes
so i spend half my days, proofreading my lines
to make sure that i'm exactly the same size
as everyone else

when i first met you it absolutely blew me away
to find someone else who lowers their eyes
i'm serious, it's amazing to find someone who wastes as much time as yourself
hitting backspace, and
cursing auto-correct for not allowing this behavior

but after a while i noticed you stopped with the i's
maybe it was around the time **** got weird
maybe it was a fad; or i have some absurd superstition
but it's cool
You always were the bigger person, anyway.
that we exist
that we are whole
that we are worthy
that we are accepted
that we are respected
that we are connected
that we are appreciated
that we are of consequence

that we even matter at all...
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