What repose and subtle wonder it is
to venture looking backward
upon my written name.
Scribbled, lacking coherence in its characters,
doctored suggestively towards containing
an inherent “literary” edge
out of just what it is,
an association of sounds,
(parent’s gifted accidents of intention)
commingled and pushed into
an accepted truth by repetition
and repetition alone.
The surges of black-tongued self-consciousness
-that I’m far above the spot-scratching undergraduate
notion of admiring my personal stamp, of falling in love
with myself by using “bigger” words to fetishize
my most basic claim on having existed, of being HERE-
are given rise.
These fade, by examples immemorial, to give way to other voices
striving for attention, to grasp their mark upon the page.
Late evening
On a wall,
Initials carved with a filthy bar
of rationed soap
In Dungeon Europe’s eastern range.
Where prison bars once hounded in
where beating’s sounded off
morning’s crisp hue
The inevitable made its finer points here
Trampling over names and voices
lost to history.
Now a museum
the lunch-time rush
of internationals
(who mostly work for corporations with offices in every place they travel)
Photograph themselves with expensive cameras
After shuddering, some even hazarding a tear
in considering what fates have befell
occupants on the wrong side of a different bureaucracy
....but all that matters, after they leave, is the the proof
they were there. And how it was just how they imagined.
Morning, in my bedroom
and I’ve written something again...
I can stack it away
if I feel that I failed to capture
what I wanted to be seen
(if not in my own handwriting,
then on some gilded white screen
letters upright and well-rounded.)
How much can it matter to me?
Seeing my own name
allotted above or at the end
of some juvenile thoughtpiece
the kind editors everywhere
are doing their best to get rid of.
I suppose I write because it pushes me out of the expected
it releases me, on these mornings, these graceful, time-blessed
mornings, out of the cell.
To roam among the other skeptics, who thought aloud to wistfully
spend time away from the routine
To hold aloft a lighter-flame for those trapped inside.
