or unconscious on the sidewalk while a kneeling fireman checks his—what? Breath, or pulse. His mechanisms. He has some moving parts. Lungs expand heart pumps and what is more mechanical than a pump? Still there are questions about brain function. These are vital signs-- maybe in the back of the ambulance is one of those contraptions-- metal disks with wires yellow green stick them on your head it makes a ticker tape of how your brain arcs little sparks between cells of the tissue packed in your skull. That’s how you make a fist or blow a kiss. Signals travel on pathways trafficking your impulses branching to your extremities. Someone told us that but it's pure horseshit. You have no idea how you make a fist or blow a kiss it's second nature, it's just obvious. Even the foremost neurologist can’t tell us how without resorting to a shrug.
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Warriors, enemies on horses stampede with drawn swords torches and malice from the hills above the village. In a blinding moment they are on us, a ferocious storm of bloodlust and wild eyes. Our home is aflame our children fall beneath hooves from distant towns with strange names, foreign kings we never-- Today the world ends. I chop off the head of the snake. Its reptile eyes refuse to darken its jaws stretch open, gaping in defiance, the long muscle of body stretches to rejoin the head urging toward resurrection. The world ends where my father vanished where my mother baptized me where I carry the head of the snake in one fist and the body in the other. I wave the world from existence with a gesture, a prying open, a stretching of something spinal, a willing for what is emergent. at least. One is bright as the sun with a voice like music tossing picked flowers into the wind runs laughing to the water’s edge and jumps in with glad splashing Sometimes he darkens over shadowed by the same old terror that seizes every perfect innocent who discovers this is a world of arbitrary death and no one can change that or stop it The other one of me is his father who cradles his head strokes his hair who has been defeated laid down his life so there is nothing more to do in the end but sit quietly and love When I step in dogdoo barefoot I get a boner. I think this is true for a lot of people—more than you think, more than will admit it because of taboos and social mores surrounding a physiology like mine. It’s not like I’m into peeing on people or watching people pee on each other although someone may prefer that to feeling warm dogdoo squish between their toes. It's fine. I brought up this subject during bible study hoping for a reception of good christian tolerance and unconditional love at church last week after reading in Genesis about Lot’s two daughters who got their father drunk and they both had incest with him after he passed out because he had no heir and they had no spawn which seemed reason enough at the time. That’s in the bible and it’s way worse I think than a dogdoo boner as far as morality goes and I said so. But the bretheren were upset with me, asked me to leave then continued to ponder the scriptures. In the churchyard over by the roses the pastor’s wife was walking their poodle and guess what? it does not hover frozen in future time it does not give chase. I do not feel it in my gut like my father does walking the dog early in the morning hours borrowed with a collateral of bypass surgery and low sodium. Death is the seabed accruing. We drift down, particulate, a gradual disintegration of layers like the crumbling of sandstone cliffs in a million tiny landslides, each dropping a handful of pebbles from the walls. |
Poems from Other Days
September 2020
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