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