Letter 17 – Death From the East
I
Listen to the beeping. Not a truck in reverse this is
to wake
the poem out of its
subtle slumber
and carve its
wispy
words onto the tabularasa.
That dream of working Sundays @ ‘XRT can
come
to an end. It’s all
you now not Bobby Skafish
who you may be
when
sleepy.
The beeping marks the
death of another night. The Knight of Swords
card
indicates a desire to
charge ahead
change what is weak - what ain’t
working –
Death from the east
overlooks the flesh still clinging to
the bone
no
one has the balls to let fall
off & rot in
to the next world yet to do so is to
become
unbound.
II
Not September when Mars crawls out of the sky to
clear
a path for the Harvest Moon
to shine on the valley where
truck farms once left bean fields
in Slaughter we’re
in August. Life in
reverse where the commerce takes the back seat to
this ritual in community &
sleep-deprivation
is depraved the
root? or
to deprive an editor his
mind to
wake w/o thinking
the
poem from deep in the cave coax
out a bit of chaos a personal mythology
of longing for union twisted
into
its bastard cousin lust
but the soul’s
subtle imagery morning star as a rider on fire out of
slumber chasing the night away
and making its mark to
carve the bones of
its heartsong
into
wispy
words that somehow make some
sense sometime later.
Onto the page bone white & receptive
the bullet to the back of the
dream head uncommitted another
tabularasa to begin anew.
(Phrases in I taken from Ralph
Blum –
The
Book of Runes. From II taken from the 2nd sentence of I.)
© 2003 by the respective poets