Echo.He does not wish to think of themOr the vaginas that are not his to put onOr the illusive woman who would be sick with himlike a child lying on the sofa in fever and hopingThat in the shadows on the wall and thePassing sounds that are concentrated on her mindOne will bring deliverance--only placing thedeliveranceOn him and yet loving him for himselfBeyond that need. And while unlocking the door of hiscarHe feels that the recreation in life is also aroutine:A routine of sharing and parting,And at the end one is grounded and tossedBefore the validity of his ownPerceptions is resolved.But he is alive,Now; and he will put away his groceries;Read a chapter of his Biblia,A cenotaph of the dead..maybe a verse; think of forgetting massand mailing in his tithingAnd to veg' himself away a few hoursBefore he would have another nightOf throats, lungs andThe air of the masses.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Come(Camp Wonderland for the Retarded, Lake of the Ozarks)Grabbing the already read letter,Slipping out hot and wetFrom the bare mattress--Like Sweet Pea's turdsRight beforeHis psychomotor seizures,Only without a softness to stub myselfInto--stiff and hard I dropFrom the cold rim of the bunk(Even if I awakenThe idiots below).With non-syllables and vowellessnessA pitch that is language enoughTo keep this man, Jim,From whereverThe unassimilated disappearHowls "He does not want me here"While its flesh of Jim beats the plastic urinalOn the walls barricading a pillowed head.The joke is on him this time...All over him for the next hours.The letter's impressionWrites and rewrites in my mind:Come, my sister calls to our fatherLike Ronnie's suppositories butting back.Only suppositories are meant to do so.Come, she speaks to me,And the shrinkShall put in touchAll that he did to us.Tripping over Keith's mattressI step out in humid silenceAnd wipe my cheeks.Two cabins, beside ours, simultaneously fryBugs in blue, electric lights.Keith, a crippled rocking horse of autism,Scrapes the feet of his vibrating bodyTo the bench where I sit.Sit, Keith; go back to bed, Keith;Go to the bathroom, Keith:In this camp I shape the minutes of his lifeTo some acceptable pattern.He rubs his hands togetherAs if trying to spark fireFor the inhabitantsOf his imaginary world.Stop that, Keith, I say.Sit, Keith.Keith sits:There is no coming outFor him after twenty yearsThis way,Or perhaps for me.The pale gas lamps are strewn aroundA small area of limbsIn a corner of the sky--All but patches are aflameLike a roof of a tent aroundThe stakes, ready to break offAnd fall.Rock, Keith,As the sun is strokedSo far into the lap of the night,Suffocating and as good as gone.The folding and unfoldingOf a crinkled letter into squares;The imagining of the counselorOf cabin fourAnd what a pulse would have createdIf her head had drowsedTo my hand on the back of her seatOn our way here;The general silent howling of "Come!"--Keith does not cripple to this.He has no sister that calls a stranger backTo erase and draw backThem both.He does not say "come!"All hours.He comes.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------A Gentleman's RightHe must have thoughtThat there was some covenant of the oldThat bound each to move around itIn a square orbit.he was fifty now, so thereMust not have been any question:Lessen the speed at the train tracks;Stumble his car over their ribs;Swerve closely to the driveAt a slower pace, and hopeThat where men dodge the bumpingOf their tails from ParksFor a private club,That one would comeOut from the doors, partnerless.If not, he would haveTo go around the blockAnother timeLike other old fags before--The railway crippling withIts iron in each return raising,Cracking up from the skin of the street;Limbs of that bar's treeWaving down (someTo the windshield), warning.Thoughts that the energy of youthHad some pivotal focusMade each imagined man to himLike a lollipop,but the parks would not do:There the man with the smashed fenderMight be obligated to 69A winner without a face--a drag race ending in the winner's backseat,And on his tools which would rib in.And inside that bar where women snuggleAway their faces in equality,And where men rotate hips on the dance floorLike an earth's axes...this would not do:For there were no friends to affectMutually and faggishly in embraces;And the young and sensitiveWere Oriental and fonderOf the cigarettesThey put in their facesAnd the beers that suddenly appearedBefore them. This would not do:Mouth-hugging the earthOn its bulge of lifeOr moving to songsWhere the dances never end.He was an old fag and must retainA square orbit.It, at least,Was a gentleman's rightAnd in accordance with theManner of the fags.The block was long.In the shadows and oblique actualitiesHe felt its length.His stomach tightenedIn fear of the length.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Transitional MendacitiesNo, the supremity of having been split off fromA larger entity by being spit outFrom pussy lips whileReeking pain and havocLike a living tongue pulledFrom aperture and denIs not sign enoughThat he is meantTo be sustainedAs an integral part of the world,Unique and indispensable.Thinking about how much longerHe will need to play out the dayThat issue is not his, and never has been."The job was done"He could say, later,After the storm.Hand-limp,His broom dance sweepsUpended under an empty park bench--Dirt caught underThe tongues of his feet--So his paycheckWill come in the mailAnd become bank figuresHe can suck fromTo keep he and his womanHoused and fed, and well enoughTo legally rape each other in embraces,Forgetful of their lives.The man has a son,and stands nightsaching behind an assembly line,Sleeping the days awayWhile his son goes to school.The son thinks his fatherIs thoughtless and dirtyAnd his mother a grease-bitchFor marrying him.The son grows upBetween his college books,And begins to put it together:A society of menWanting to take a varietyOf stimulating produce--Though some were more the makersThan the takers;The image of rightnessIn a man putting his hormonesTo the making of a companyIn a family; a familyThat needs a provider to survive;A man honorable and trappedAnd there are nightsHe awakens, gagging at theSudden thought of a manNext to himWho had engaged his bodyIn a lower form of sharing.And he wonders if embracing a worldOf ideas can be doneWhen all things cannot be believed;If humanism isEnergy ventedTo avoid futility;And what grossnessHe would have to justify next--All on those nightsWhen self-perspectivesAre swept under in change.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Man of CoalYou knew it was coming:Twenty-three years and the mineWould notice you one time,Photocopied.A voice below bellowsYour name, Dave,Into the settling air of coal dust.After you shut off the enginesAnd descend beneath the dragline's skeletalNose which canopies like a skyscraper onIts side in mid-airYou confront a faceYou cannot see in the descending sun.Shadow-still,Enormous might engulfing over youTo the height ofThe dragline's triple-tank wheels,You see him--The heels on his leather bootsLocked in the train-track grooves of dirt.As he hands the notice to youIts stiffness shakesIn your calloused hand.You know that what is left of the dayIs becoming cold; and despite the smellOf dirt there is a scentOf watermelon in the damp air,Although you do not know it as that smellOr that there is a smell at all, really.And yet a faintness of some half-knowledgeThat touches its weight lightly in your mindDrags itself into places you cannot touch.Pulling out of his shadowYou think of how you might handThis sheet to your wifeLike a child presenting to his motherAn award from school:Your wife screaming laughter of reliefAs she hugs the paper to her breast;Or how your strong hand might sweatAs you pick up the receiver of the ringing phone,Expecting that after saying "Hi"That one of your college children's voices would endThe conversation thereFor you to hand the vibrationsTo your wife--but insteadThat childCongratulates youFor no longer destroying the land.The noon hour whistleVibrates the wallsOf the hollow heavensTo the cab; the thermos-wellOf soup, sitting on your lap, you cannot see, butYou feel its stillnessStagnating and absorbingThe contaminating mineralsOf the tin, walling in the contents;And still you want to turn on the ignitionTo finish out one more complete dayIn the twenty-three years hereOf hard work.The quandary then snaps, and you escape.When out of the valley you enter the truckAnd close the door--The second time harder, and it latches.You turn the keyAnd the truck bounces to the highway.You stop at the sign;Stop the motor whileStill on the dirt road;But in the end turn left, again,Home.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Maddog(Or Death to the Barbie-Dame Image)You said that it happened--that day you ran awayFrom a self you buried underneath the ice-packed snow,All those cold years ago--when your last friend, thenHad put an end to the Gabriele whom I've never known.ThisFriend, like yourself a Barbie Dame, became totallylame andWithdrew out the door when you needed more hands tokeepYour epileptic roommateFrom smashing her head on the floor.Gabriele, held together by the stitching of hate--The plastic-eyed polar bear with the stiff armsThat the factory of the human race mutantly created--This time it will be you who shall feel the wall ofartificialFur ripped from its threads, and your stuffing fallingout.For a little maddog on top of four jointsMakes a person see the unsealed human fragmentsThat had been smoothed over in timeLike a million and some bone fracturesThe milk of approval had swum into and covered overfor looks.For me fragmenting came yesterday when I saw a welcomematIced over and yet I entered:Your house was hot and your oven smelled of bakingmeatloafAlthough you had said that you could not bedomesticated.And then I saw your bottle of wineStanding at attention before two glasses.The pledge that bowing to anything or anyone waswrong...that peopleWere only needed to gain the most bareOf physiological and psychological needs (pitstops tobeinghuman)--this wasgone.Gone with your hair brushed and your skin smelling ofperfumeFor some other man than me.Come on Gabriele, the gal that used to chew tobaccoandSpit it into an empty beer can...The gal with the deep dark-ocean eyes...The maddog gal, grip that wine glass now.For Gabriele, you smile at everyone with meaningYou are as together as a feather when a hurricane isin town,And when the hangover's over and your own insight hasFragmented you from a million pieces to a billion,My stiff polar bear armsShall poke and not embrace.I sit back at this party I am hosting--My back firmly pushing against the back of my chair,And my head and eyes cocked.You all are the performers this time...And Gabriele, you are the main attraction,Attracted, after this night, to the omni-present senseof yourSmashed self; and me--Sensitive little me in no man's landWhere no man wanted to grasp me from...And no woman--Mended back together in thy survivalistic polar bearimage.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Becky's Demon"Something happened.i don't have those visions anymore."And you believe with a mind like Papa believed withWhen i told him i could see thingsClearly before they actuallyWere.His back and forth pacing from those same twowindows--Which had been like a toy soldier powered on a humanbatteryWith a three minute's stand at one, and then the next,Suddenly stopped.For i was different.You anointedmeAnd cast me out.i was alone.You caused me to hideBeside a pitchfork in the shadows of the corners ofthe barn.Yes.Papa stopped.His eyes moved.i'd never seenhis eyes moveBefore.They stared down at me.My child's eyesBelow--and he aimed his for them as a fisher for preyin clear waters.i backed up behind the pipe of the kitchen stove..But with one stretch he reached his arm overLike a bear's paw that in force comes down like aRedwood.my knee aching as if broken, i crutched upFrom the other side of the room, beside the door....Then, bending on my knees the next conscious second--Feeling the blood of knee caps sticking to hay anddirt--Seeing the sun poke like sticks through rafters andcobwebs--Thinking i grabbed a hold on the sunlight which couldLift meUp like a rope; but grasping the pitchfork--Raising the pitchfork--Pitching the pitchfork--After hearing the creaking and scraping of the openingbarn doorPlowingThe top soil of the dry earth.Thinking:he wouldnever killmy shadowy corner.IIAnd in this plush chair of the Bishop's office i sit adecadeAnd a half later--a Salem witch of the west explainingherDull, trembling self before three Mormon men bendingaboveme.But you don't understand me, as if anyone ever has.i had psychic abilities.But you don't want them, sothey'reGone;And i'm good.i no longer believe, Bish'y, that I sawBensonDyingAnd Yourself rising above theTwelve.But You're still scared of me.You only want toanoint meAnd cast me out.You only want me to hide in a barn,And belong to shadows.You call my abilities a possession of a demon.Papa doubted i could see; and you see me as perverted.But you do see that i see...That i have something with some power.You and the Missionaries lay your hands on me...me who left my Protestant roots so as to be rooted inyourFamily.You put your cold hands on my forehead,Trying to vacuum out my psychic abilities,Which i tell you are no longer--Trying to take away my saying that i'm okay...i'm good.Speak to me.Don't cast me out and leave.
Echo.
He does not wish to think of them
Or the vaginas that are not his to put on
Or the illusive woman who would be sick with him
like a child lying on the sofa in fever and hoping
That in the shadows on the wall and the
Passing sounds that are concentrated on her mind
One will bring deliverance--only placing the
deliverance
On him and yet loving him for himself
Beyond that need. And while unlocking the door of his
car
He feels that the recreation in life is also a
routine:
A routine of sharing and parting,
And at the end one is grounded and tossed
Before the validity of his own
Perceptions is resolved.But he is alive,
Now; and he will put away his groceries;
Read a chapter of his Biblia,
A cenotaph of the dead..
maybe a verse; think of forgetting mass
and mailing in his tithing
And to veg' himself away a few hours
Before he would have another night
Of throats, lungs and
The air of the masses.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Come
(Camp Wonderland for the Retarded, Lake of the Ozarks)
Grabbing the already read letter,
Slipping out hot and wet
From the bare mattress--
Like Sweet Pea's turds
Right before
His psychomotor seizures,
Only without a softness to stub myself
Into--stiff and hard I drop
From the cold rim of the bunk
(Even if I awaken
The idiots below).
With non-syllables and vowellessness
A pitch that is language enough
To keep this man, Jim,
From wherever
The unassimilated disappear
Howls "He does not want me here"
While its flesh of Jim beats the plastic urinal
On the walls barricading a pillowed head.
The joke is on him this time...
All over him for the next hours.
The letter's impression
Writes and rewrites in my mind:
Come, my sister calls to our father
Like Ronnie's suppositories butting back.
Only suppositories are meant to do so.
Come, she speaks to me,
And the shrink
Shall put in touch
All that he did to us.
Tripping over Keith's mattress
I step out in humid silence
And wipe my cheeks.
Two cabins, beside ours, simultaneously fry
Bugs in blue, electric lights.
Keith, a crippled rocking horse of autism,
Scrapes the feet of his vibrating body
To the bench where I sit.
Sit, Keith; go back to bed, Keith;
Go to the bathroom, Keith:
In this camp I shape the minutes of his life
To some acceptable pattern.
He rubs his hands together
As if trying to spark fire
For the inhabitants
Of his imaginary world.
Stop that, Keith, I say.Sit, Keith.
Keith sits:There is no coming out
For him after twenty years
This way,
Or perhaps for me.
The pale gas lamps are strewn around
A small area of limbs
In a corner of the sky--
All but patches are aflame
Like a roof of a tent around
The stakes, ready to break off
And fall.
Rock, Keith,
As the sun is stroked
So far into the lap of the night,
Suffocating and as good as gone.
The folding and unfolding
Of a crinkled letter into squares;
The imagining of the counselor
Of cabin four
And what a pulse would have created
If her head had drowsed
To my hand on the back of her seat
On our way here;
The general silent howling of "Come!"--
Keith does not cripple to this.
He has no sister that calls a stranger back
To erase and draw back
Them both.
He does not say "come!"
All hours.
He comes.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Gentleman's Right
He must have thought
That there was some covenant of the old
That bound each to move around it
In a square orbit.
he was fifty now, so there
Must not have been any question:
Lessen the speed at the train tracks;
Stumble his car over their ribs;
Swerve closely to the drive
At a slower pace, and hope
That where men dodge the bumping
Of their tails from Parks
For a private club,
That one would come
Out from the doors, partnerless.
If not, he would have
To go around the block
Another time
Like other old fags before--
The railway crippling with
Its iron in each return raising,
Cracking up from the skin of the street;
Limbs of that bar's tree
Waving down (some
To the windshield), warning.
Thoughts that the energy of youth
Had some pivotal focus
Made each imagined man to him
Like a lollipop,
but the parks would not do:
There the man with the smashed fender
Might be obligated to 69
A winner without a face--
a drag race ending in the winner's backseat,
And on his tools which would rib in.
And inside that bar where women snuggle
Away their faces in equality,
And where men rotate hips on the dance floor
Like an earth's axes...this would not do:
For there were no friends to affect
Mutually and faggishly in embraces;
And the young and sensitive
Were Oriental and fonder
Of the cigarettes
They put in their faces
And the beers that suddenly appeared
Before them. This would not do:
Mouth-hugging the earth
On its bulge of life
Or moving to songs
Where the dances never end.
He was an old fag and must retain
A square orbit.
It, at least,
Was a gentleman's right
And in accordance with the
Manner of the fags.
The block was long.
In the shadows and oblique actualities
He felt its length.His stomach tightened
In fear of the length.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Transitional Mendacities
No, the supremity of having been split off from
A larger entity by being spit out
From pussy lips while
Reeking pain and havoc
Like a living tongue pulled
From aperture and den
Is not sign enough
That he is meant
To be sustained
As an integral part of the world,
Unique and indispensable.
Thinking about how much longer
He will need to play out the day
That issue is not his, and never has been.
"The job was done"
He could say, later,
After the storm.
Hand-limp,
His broom dance sweeps
Upended under an empty park bench--
Dirt caught under
The tongues of his feet--
So his paycheck
Will come in the mail
And become bank figures
He can suck from
To keep he and his woman
Housed and fed, and well enough
To legally rape each other in embraces,
Forgetful of their lives.
The man has a son,
and stands nights
aching behind an assembly line,
Sleeping the days away
While his son goes to school.
The son thinks his father
Is thoughtless and dirty
And his mother a grease-bitch
For marrying him.
The son grows up
Between his college books,
And begins to put it together:
A society of men
Wanting to take a variety
Of stimulating produce--
Though some were more the makers
Than the takers;
The image of rightness
In a man putting his hormones
To the making of a company
In a family; a family
That needs a provider to survive;
A man honorable and trapped
And there are nights
He awakens, gagging at the
Sudden thought of a man
Next to him
Who had engaged his body
In a lower form of sharing.
And he wonders if embracing a world
Of ideas can be done
When all things cannot be believed;
If humanism is
Energy vented
To avoid futility;
And what grossness
He would have to justify next--
All on those nights
When self-perspectives
Are swept under in change.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Man of Coal
You knew it was coming:
Twenty-three years and the mine
Would notice you one time,
Photocopied.
A voice below bellows
Your name, Dave,
Into the settling air of coal dust.
After you shut off the engines
And descend beneath the dragline's skeletal
Nose which canopies like a skyscraper on
Its side in mid-air
You confront a face
You cannot see in the descending sun.Shadow-still,
Enormous might engulfing over you
To the height of
The dragline's triple-tank wheels,
You see him--
The heels on his leather boots
Locked in the train-track grooves of dirt.
As he hands the notice to you
Its stiffness shakes
In your calloused hand.
You know that what is left of the day
Is becoming cold; and despite the smell
Of dirt there is a scent
Of watermelon in the damp air,
Although you do not know it as that smell
Or that there is a smell at all, really.
And yet a faintness of some half-knowledge
That touches its weight lightly in your mind
Drags itself into places you cannot touch.
Pulling out of his shadow
You think of how you might hand
This sheet to your wife
Like a child presenting to his mother
An award from school:
Your wife screaming laughter of relief
As she hugs the paper to her breast;
Or how your strong hand might sweat
As you pick up the receiver of the ringing phone,
Expecting that after saying "Hi"
That one of your college children's voices would end
The conversation there
For you to hand the vibrations
To your wife--but instead
That child
Congratulates you
For no longer destroying the land.
The noon hour whistle
Vibrates the walls
Of the hollow heavens
To the cab; the thermos-well
Of soup, sitting on your lap, you cannot see, but
You feel its stillness
Stagnating and absorbing
The contaminating minerals
Of the tin, walling in the contents;
And still you want to turn on the ignition
To finish out one more complete day
In the twenty-three years here
Of hard work.
The quandary then snaps, and you escape.
When out of the valley you enter the truck
And close the door--
The second time harder, and it latches.
You turn the key
And the truck bounces to the highway.
You stop at the sign;
Stop the motor while
Still on the dirt road;
But in the end turn left, again,
Home.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Maddog
(Or Death to the Barbie-Dame Image)
You said that it happened--that day you ran away
From a self you buried underneath the ice-packed snow,
All those cold years ago--when your last friend, then
Had put an end to the Gabriele whom I've never known.
This
Friend, like yourself a Barbie Dame, became totally
lame and
Withdrew out the door when you needed more hands to
keep
Your epileptic roommate
From smashing her head on the floor.
Gabriele, held together by the stitching of hate--
The plastic-eyed polar bear with the stiff arms
That the factory of the human race mutantly created--
This time it will be you who shall feel the wall of
artificial
Fur ripped from its threads, and your stuffing falling
out.
For a little maddog on top of four joints
Makes a person see the unsealed human fragments
That had been smoothed over in time
Like a million and some bone fractures
The milk of approval had swum into and covered over
for looks.
For me fragmenting came yesterday when I saw a welcome
mat
Iced over and yet I entered:
Your house was hot and your oven smelled of baking
meatloaf
Although you had said that you could not be
domesticated.
And then I saw your bottle of wine
Standing at attention before two glasses.
The pledge that bowing to anything or anyone was
wrong...that people
Were only needed to gain the most bare
Of physiological and psychological needs (pitstops to
being
human)--this was
gone.
Gone with your hair brushed and your skin smelling of
perfume
For some other man than me.
Come on Gabriele, the gal that used to chew tobacco
and
Spit it into an empty beer can...
The gal with the deep dark-ocean eyes...
The maddog gal, grip that wine glass now.
For Gabriele, you smile at everyone with meaning
You are as together as a feather when a hurricane is
in town,
And when the hangover's over and your own insight has
Fragmented you from a million pieces to a billion,
My stiff polar bear arms
Shall poke and not embrace.
I sit back at this party I am hosting--
My back firmly pushing against the back of my chair,
And my head and eyes cocked.
You all are the performers this time...
And Gabriele, you are the main attraction,
Attracted, after this night, to the omni-present sense
of your
Smashed self; and me--
Sensitive little me in no man's land
Where no man wanted to grasp me from...
And no woman--
Mended back together in thy survivalistic polar bear
image.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Becky's Demon
"Something happened.
i don't have those visions anymore."
And you believe with a mind like Papa believed with
When i told him i could see things
Clearly before they actually
Were.
His back and forth pacing from those same two
windows--
Which had been like a toy soldier powered on a human
battery
With a three minute's stand at one, and then the next,
Suddenly stopped.For i was different.You anointed
me
And cast me out.i was alone.You caused me to hide
Beside a pitchfork in the shadows of the corners of
the barn.
Yes.Papa stopped.His eyes moved.i'd never seen
his eyes move
Before.
They stared down at me.My child's eyes
Below--and he aimed his for them as a fisher for prey
in clear waters.
i backed up behind the pipe of the kitchen stove..
But with one stretch he reached his arm over
Like a bear's paw that in force comes down like a
Redwood.
my knee aching as if broken, i crutched up
From the other side of the room, beside the door....
Then, bending on my knees the next conscious second--
Feeling the blood of knee caps sticking to hay and
dirt--
Seeing the sun poke like sticks through rafters and
cobwebs--
Thinking i grabbed a hold on the sunlight which could
Lift me
Up like a rope; but grasping the pitchfork--
Raising the pitchfork--
Pitching the pitchfork--
After hearing the creaking and scraping of the opening
barn door
Plowing
The top soil of the dry earth.Thinking:he would
never kill
my shadowy corner.
II
And in this plush chair of the Bishop's office i sit a
decade
And a half later--a Salem witch of the west explaining
her
Dull, trembling self before three Mormon men bending
above
me.
But you don't understand me, as if anyone ever has.
i had psychic abilities.But you don't want them, so
they're
Gone;
And i'm good.i no longer believe, Bish'y, that I saw
Benson
Dying
And Yourself rising above the
Twelve.
But You're still scared of me.You only want to
anoint me
And cast me out.You only want me to hide in a barn,
And belong to shadows.
You call my abilities a possession of a demon.
Papa doubted i could see; and you see me as perverted.
But you do see that i see...
That i have something with some power.
You and the Missionaries lay your hands on me...
me who left my Protestant roots so as to be rooted in
your
Family.
You put your cold hands on my forehead,
Trying to vacuum out my psychic abilities,
Which i tell you are no longer--
Trying to take away my saying that i'm okay...
i'm good.Speak to me.Don't cast me out and leave.