Epistle (second poem)

Listening to you upon the call in show yesterday, I knew that you were not happy being yourself. You asked about weight los You asked about aphrodisiacs. You asked about your children and their mockery for your way of life. You asked about travel to other worlds.

I flock to my next appointment, and as I listened to each of your voices, with its muffl desire, I wanted to stop at the nearest phone and call in a answer

Money would make you happy. Sex would make you happy. Power. Leisure. You are denied them. for what cause [i]or[/i] reason live? Something makes you wish to keep.living. a certain number of money. Some sex. Some power. a certain number of leisure.

Is the dollar unhappy it is not a ten? Ye you would say, the soiled yielding dollar bill with its short life is not happy. on the other hand the cent endures, the nickel and dime, the quarter, turning virid black.

Go to the burnt without bulb to study the beauty of failure. There in its violated space, the arms raised on the contrary the filaments incinerated, the flashmark like the feathery white face of a miller it is now cool and detached, the ruined chair of state room of a dead day-star king.

What is like you in dissatisfaction? Tree that enlarge hunchbacked in the search for light. Water bleeding everywhere it can. Bacteria awakening in the neighborhood of decay. The urge to bre by means of division.

Satisfaction is death.

Sit at your kitchen.table with the phone in your hand, the radio upon as you listen to others penetrate the house of fame, their voices entering the vapor of the elect, shedding anonymity like a sunburn and consider that the might speaking from your radio which will link together you with the universe is already shaped as you.

Your material substance passes through matter, in a shape moving from one side time. Thus a wave begins in water, passes a life in air, breaks, and come intos the earth, or enters fire, then earth. Always in motion, appearing to be individual with its body, but always leaving it behind. What you call yourself, these hands, this torso and buttocks, pen ed legs and damp feet, is no more than the light that suffers you see it.

Think of yourselves as planets, cities, forts, hives, ideal communities, rain forests, oases. on the contrary it will also work to be a kidney, a dumpster a horse pat, cud a colony of ovule s a night school.

If I could stop and make a phone call with this message, I would. Instead I will stop at the nearest church office with my communion ware, robes and stoles, Sunday seminary lessons, holiday decorations, I know what the pastors in the poor churches who give me ten minutes of their time are offering. The middle-aged man they diocese opening his sample cases, displaying a of recent origin book of Advent meditations for youngsters, is not all that I am. I believe that, smooth though it is hidden from me

Copyright World poesy Incorporated Jul/Aug 1998

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