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Mar 2018
35,088 feet over Nebraska,  

(Nebraska-imagining me climbing a ladder, me upwards, Jacob’s angels coming down, off to a high school All Saints wrestling match in a cornfield town)

a place not on my bucket list, just a blue bias of an eastern stater’s unknowns, a sure sign of how much he doesn’t know

reading Patti’s slender volume “Devotion”

slender like her body, some would call it a wiry woman's
sparse but directed, connective, word-worshipping,
old familiar strangers she delivers to you that you have never met, her phraseology striking me and strikingly beautiful simultaneous

scan it and understanding instantaneous
she asking,
why do we write?

her answers are fine copper wire threaded
into a coil and I close it quick cause the loving ****** desire to
plagiarize such an oddly gorgeous offerings is overwhelming;
I feel the wire words piercing my temple, intending to
emerge out the other side, a decorative symmetry,
I don’t own

my need to script some cursive on my smooth body parts,
on my god-given papyrus, always at the ready,
is a methadone itch, a dulling urge needy for fulfillment,
that needs satisfying but me, soundly second rate,
write like the flip side of a hit vinyl record, no one is expected to play, fulfillment meets futility

thus the title is a modification of a Patti light touch

my alchemy never made any gold and my present presence now over Iowa a reminder that my prescriptions are 1200  evacuations; they are negative commandments,
proscriptions, not prescriptions

do not write, do not wrong words with a middling diffidence,
hide your face and put her words on a shelf above your head
hard to reach, so you do not be tempted

why do we write?

“All seeking an emptiness to imbue with words.  
The words that will penetrate ******
territory, crack unclaimed
combinations, articulate the infinite.” Patti Smith

disambiguation she relieves us of uncertainty
my combinations over Waterloo, Illinois
are ordinary smokestack gray, a spewing wastage,
the angels conforming that my words Cain-fail,
my confession
meets no one’s standards, not even mine

7:07pm Central Time
march 25 2018
Written by
Nat Lipstadt  M/nyc
(M/nyc)   
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