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OH MY LORD

Oh my Lord, oh my God!
	This prayer which can’t be written or chanted; which is silent, parts of it whispered.
	I am sad, and wake badly. Give me relief, give to me relief from mood, from bad weather.
	Give me peace, and the chirping sadness that birds know. Release me, and others, from this age’s devastation.
	Infinite are the games you made for us; there is painting, there is law, there is prison-making.
	Give us a good game to play, let there be constant feeling of progress, surround our house with wind.
	And if not progress, then the peace of sleepy days, of old age and children in the garden.
	Task us with a good task. We were not made to be bored. Neither were we made to be lonely.
	These feelings especial to our age. Why, Lord, did you let us construct this failure of a world?
	For the ancients knew sadness straightforwardly, they sang of madness as holy.
	When, Oh Lord, did you ruin our interconnections?
	The parent does not know the child, the child overdoses on milk, in search of reprieve.
	Where your pardon, where goes your falcon that flies overhead a circle of happiness.
	Did the owls chase it away, did the crows get together and assault it one by one?
	For once I too knew the skimming of the sky.
	But now I am assaulted on all sides by being ignored, by the feeling of myself.
	Did the Satan win? It is written you banished him to the deep. But why is my mind so old?
	In youth one ought to be young. But why can’t I think straight, why do I can’t think?
	The ancient Psalmists spoke of eternal devastation, but still they spoke; and never said:
	I CAN’T THINK, I WANT TO DIE.
	I CAN’T SPEAK, I WANT TO DIE.
	Did you change something special to our age, or did you simply kill early those ancients like us?
	So that we have no record of them.
	I WANT TO DIE, I WANT TO DIE.
	Did they whisper this prayer too, every morning, knowing it was only temporary?
	My taskless mornings are boring and the same.
	Where are you? I am violent of fists and mind.
	Where are you? I seek you in this word. And I am violent of fists and mind.

IN THE AUGUST

In the August morning I was led down to the river and baptized in the sun noonday of flesh.
	Out of my body was I parted; my feet went into the water and my self lifted away.
	In the distant city the lines of laundry flapped.
	The Minister came with his Black Book. I waited, and listened as he chanted:
	NO MORE THIS CHILD OF THE EARTH, NOW HE IS A GIFT TO GOD.
	I wept, for now I was a child of God.

2.27.2020

NOTHING

What prevents me, I ask you, from baptizing us right now?
	Water is as holy fire. So clean – oh my God!
	Oh my God, oh my God, OH—my God!
	Water is clean; it burns as holy fire.
	I have seen a cistern in a cathedral, on a pedestal. As the pastor spoke, like a bird I drank.
	Oh clean it was oh my reader – clean was the water, clear as crystal recovering!
	What prevents you, but the lack of my genie, from drinking together a cup of nothing, a cup of water?
	Baptism is pretend. Everyone dresses up, claps their hands like manifold thunder, sings.
	Then they dunk you underwater, your ears fill with pressure and they hold you tight.
	The bubbles, the muffled underwater singing.
	As sirens, underwater our deaths sing to us, they ask us to join them as our loved ones when they are lost to us.
	And when again you live, the singing in the clear air, in the normal space, in the happy community.
	But I was a shirking child, I crouched, piping mad. I turned insane, bent inward, and hated them.
	For underwater there had been singing. And who wants your pats on the back, your congratulations?
	Underwater, held down by their arms, oh there was singing, oh there was rejoicing.
	My eyes burst with white flowers. My mouth sucked in water. My lungs were balloons of fire.

	Who are you! that you turn to face me right now?
	These are sentences I write; not a moving frame.
	I see you…I must be insane.

2.27.2020

LOOK

I have not found my true self in twenty years. What prevents me, I ask, from finding it now?
	Twenty years I lived not knowing where I was. Where I was going. Twenty years, a damn potato!
	In this noonday – thirty minutes ago I wanted to die – this house is surrounded by wind –
	Oh in your eyes, that I may find myself.
	Oh in your whispering, may that I find.
	Here I am, here I am, here I am.
	Son of God, I will go kill my son. I will summon my feet. I will do your bidding.
	Here I am, here I am, here am I!
	But am I here? or do I merely gather together the bands of the wind, a knot in time?
	Will I grasp the bands of the wind that should erase me and take me away?
	Should I want rapture, the mortification of embarrassment and humiliation?
	Am I but this moment in the grammar?
	This awry notion, this accidental syntáx.
	Why shouldn’t it be, that here the memory of I AM.
	But I am losing my way.
	Oh, kill me – . For I haf lost my way.

NO MORE

I shall sing no more; I shall mail this to my friend; I shall be no more.
	I was on this page, but in lack of coherence I began to dissolve, to dissipate.
	Therefore am goodbye.
	May that you know me was I a spirit.
	That I presented myself here, that I showethed.
	A silly word. Emblem of that I have lost my way.
	Well, I was happy while this lasted.
	And shall gain an added plus from rereading it.
	But as it stands – and you see it too – I weaken, I am going away, I am uttering superfluous sounds.
	All psalms are a cycle; so I flower to-day after twenty of endless suff’ring.

2.27.2020