If only
I could be your
preacher but I ain’t
no hope or hopeplace
for you to rest your weary
head. I am a person like you,
devastated break inside the
impossibility—a land that calls
itself a name, a god, a people
when we say there is already
a name a god a people.
And even if there wasn’t,
the human body, its subtle flesh.
I cannot pray with any of you
because the bodies
can’t be buried or are
already or stain our stupid
American teeth.
Fresh meat being
fresh meat. The microcosm
eliminating the world, it spasms.
What is a spasm but an elevating
sphere like a relevant sophistication
in which we know slathering mouths
hunt insatiable underneath rockbone?
There’s no room for metaphors now.
Only
limb stubs
little legs made horror
in new smallness.
I am at a party, I am at an art reception, what have you.
Someone says, why this? Why is this what you care so much about?
Take me to the river, darlings. Take me to the drowning place and the drowned.
Take me to the snake forest and the big police dogs and the camps and the suicide regimes. Take me howl and fist. Take me gutted symbol for your newspaper rituals and unrelenting prisons of ideology.
Notes:
Audio poem performed by the author.
Source: Poetry (July/August 2024)