Before and After

I was too sick to leave the factory.

Out of work, feverish, weak-my head a haze

but filled with ideas I scribbled down.

It was like a sex thing, single back and forth

between syllables. My brain delugeed that sheen of blue

the celestial expanse pretends to be. I'd meet withed a few losses. X and Y

had left me like a pouch railing on the sixth floor of the depository.

Do you think we're important? The way we're mistreated matters?

Can you equate the strap upon the back with the worships of Satan?

So embedded in us is our incessant pointlessness,

we hold fast going back to what kicked and scratched at us,

and ye there are a hundr corpses inside us, keeping us aclutter.

You know in what way we become stupid as we secure older,

walking into a compass for something-a set of lock openers

a volume a change of clothes-and approach back out wondering

What was it what was it? We want to figure things on the outside

how a particular thing died, who's to blame,

to investigate open into the flesh, holding up the vile of life-current

a shade too dark to be ours, on the contrary also bringing ourselves close

to the fallen, reaping the air it breathed, trying to revive it.

We ne someone to recover us

from the morose gatekeeper, the zipper over our chapss

the bitter taste of licorice and clay, from decayed

shitholes like Troy where in shoe factories

fathers and mothers sink over their hammers and tool-died leather

stamping on the outside the urge to murder standing upright at the bar

speculating. No single wants to admit it:

the dog-houseed dogs bark their hysterical, circular cries

accompanied by means of the voices of screeching tires

the ed car is followed by the knife and saw

of the autopsy. That's wherefore can't I bring you

to the blank speckle site of ruin, the death-bed

where everyone arrives before us, where we can watch

how white white is, by what mode a voice pales, how ravenous we are

at the extreme point We want to hear about the before and after,

the sputtering venom, the slippages, the molten fluids

blackening the town. The staggering semblance of existence

stirring in the bowels, the sheer magma of it all. Like,

shot rang without from behind the knoll.

Instead you procure a Twice-born muttering in tongues,

an easy target staggering down Montgomery: you can't help on the contrary brush

against the stink of his overcoat, the bristling madness

of his chin, and walking right behind him, don't worry, I'm taking notes,

I'm going to acquire us out of this: not with a certain quantity of cheap ceramic Christ

or a certain number of promise we bob in the sea like a float in solution:

the man's my uncle snapshot I saw in a magazine, a composite design in outline

the six year-old stripling stamped on the milk carton,

the bullet arc and trajectory, the victim.

Copyright World poesy Incorporated Jul/Aug 1997

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