I Suppose This is All a Lefthand Path

By Alice Notley
Detective Hardwood looks like Batman this morning
pouty cupidy mouth
and a lot of black sculptural clanking
the statuary in my mortuary,
the Masonic Hall having burned again in dreams
but everyone still keeps skipping towards it
it's a hollow a round shell
my life as the shape of the ways I've been fucked
by prevailing thought & practice
all the conscious and unconscious sexisms
selfishnesses affluences assumptions suppressions in drift

GET   RID   OF   ALL   CONTROLS—is what the Soul keeps screaming.
____________________

I look up someone grins
you're a bloody feral wolf-face I like you.
____________________

I sleep-walked in a dream to a man's apartment—
a man I'm doing business with—
I forgot, but how could I? how I'd gotten there,
and when I die will I remember all such forgotten things 

GET   RID   OF   THE   CONTROLS
                                                                          I want to
remember now.

I apologized to the man for not adhering to office hours
it was four a.m. Office hours are better he said.

Don't arrive anywhere in your sleep
don't mix up night and day
soul and detective. No.
____________________

There must be so much to reclaim
because I'm so limited
____________________

this.
They broke your day
they fought it you
forgot how advantageous
to be fit with god and not see eye
you forgot gold sun brilliant
in this story
go in conscious.
____________________

That queen that Assyrian woman
was so cruel and that never
occurred to her ... but

those eyes saw raw smells and gods everywhere dusty

this dust I was truly assembled from
at least as you, we are communally
such.

If you say you'll hurt me, do you
really mean me

I  can't be, can I, hurt?
____________________

“Hut Sut Tut Mut there's gonna be a wedding”
I dream that's a song. Wake up with, in my head,
“They say don't go
on Wolverton Moun-tain” (“Her tender lips/are sweeter than hone-y”
____________________

Later.
I have a drop of blood on a front tooth
I kind of don't mind—
This the list of what we've done:

         It was different structure we killed it
         put beasts in the refrigerator
         and that was almost as bad as my own enslavement.
         Then I saw Christ's blood pumped into a rejuvenating mummy.
         This great sickness we're part of apple clot
         and can you really chew it detective
         Oh sure I can, I'm Robert Mitch-ham.
____________________

you've broke your own sto

I'm sort of hysterical

the E is it for hope, cutting

the E might be for Hope

Nope

and bloody, the bloodiest is Hope.

Where are the E's of exactness?

E is my middle name





 

Copyright Credit: Alice Notley, "I Suppose This is All a Lefthand Path" from Disobedience. Copyright © 2001 by Alice Notley.  Reprinted by permission of Penguin Group (USA), Inc.
Source: Disobedience (Penguin Books, 2001)