Are you down in the mouth in the South? Pulling yer short out
of port in the North? Making a bare breast in the wilderness
to the West, or are you the beast rising at last in the East? Perhaps
you're rapture or maybe disaster, charging grim, up from the rear,
bearing dread tidings we fear to hear. Are you
now here: Nowhere at all, standing tall?
Circumambulating on a dizzying pinhead, profound in loquacious silence—
Or have you placed your reliance on islands and plunged your hands
into the sands of foreign lands where different seed roots in different dirt?
Are you hurt: Is it you I hear screaming every evening when our sun
breaks in a smoggy mess on the horizon, lurid, streaming through
the contrail stains along the lanes of landing and arising planes? Do you
also pay Verizon, like a prayer wheel spinning green paper orisons?
Or are you another raw fool, queued up to be churned through law school,
the last pederast's clerk, a pornographer's apprentice in repentance,
learning to pronounce sentence? Are you agitating with a vengeance or
flagellating with the penitents? Can you be so much more pretentiously
sententious than me? C'mon, it’s fun; you’ll see; whee! Woo-hoo!
Do you hear those perpetual blues wafting through too? Are these your
strings ringing? Are you singing the rats from the rafters, hip cats out
of their exclusive chapters? Are you mountain fox charming eggs
from the nests of your captors, those avaricious raptors’ vicious redactors;
consumption’s capricious over-actors? Do your fingers fly and your spirits soar?
Do your eyes flash as you raise your glass with triumphal roar to cry for more?
Are you a thought criminal, supraliminal, a fugitive in your own
unkind mind? Did you first eat the pulp, and then chew the rind?
Do you know you are both culpable and divine? Where will you
find the time? (I make mine out of air and fire—time, that is—and
play it out like blasting wire to caps, which in fact is where the trap's:
When it blows so goes that slow twine, and I find far more has really elapsed!)
I often wonder, break surface to gasp and call
and ask, as the paper riptide draws me back under.