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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 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 – and now 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 syntax.
- 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
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