Poemunity — your poem community

On a brain-gray day, he lay on the hill-slanted solar array with a southern exposure, toes in the clover mixed in with what are these pentagrammatic sprays of pinnate leaves. No clover here has four leaves: to each one he says I have seen you before in the nuclear hazard symbol and then again (as again slants backward) before that, as nothing but clover when childhood was not yet over and everything was symbol therefore nothing was.

It seems like I'm growing more and more like a clown. First of all, I'm always sad. Secondly, all my knives are made out of rubber. Thirdly, it's like my house is on fire. No, I'm definitely becoming more like a clown. I have a tendency to want to put on clown clothes. As soon as I put the clown clothes on I feel faintly happier... Another sign is that I constantly feel like I'm alone in a dressing room. Most of the time I feel amused. Anyway, the only thing good about the circus is the tigers. I realize that I could get both legs cut off by the circus train or get frightened by an elephant. But it's very depressing to sit around in a clown suit and think about death. Sometimes I don't feel happy unless I'm in my clown suit. And I enjoy hitting people on the head with a foam club. I really do... When people see me they realize that it looks very sophisticated to wear a clown suit and smoke a cigarette. This is how I get all the ladies because they think I'm very droll. People don't understand how you turn into a clown. You turn into a clown because you feel more and more like putting on a clown suit. When you're around people you sense a kindliness. It makes you so nervous you can't stay calm. Which is why it feels perfectly normal to wear orange pants. Plus, it's very subversive to wear bow ties. You can't imagine how jolly everything is. And the fright wigs... I don't want to be a clown but I'm sure to be one. My mother was a clown.

Meanwhile, meanwhile used to be my limp’s accompaniment. Meanwhile (as my legs maneuvered an abyss), a ballet is beginning, and the dancer’s perfect feet propel her downstage, where applause is waiting. Meanwhile a sad man stomps his gloom away by stomping evenly: one two, one two means never blue, his motto goes. But I was born to other paces, different measures; the roads I take are undulant and lined with fluid hedges, trees that take a dive whenever I am near; a bird’s ascent slows down to an eternal crawl; and when a doctor’s order takes me to the city it is a jagged gotham, full of spires that waver in the sky like falling knives or silver metronomes. Meanwhile, meanwhile (the rhythm steadied me) a lover steals upon his mistress with the quietness that only flatfeet know. So quietly that he might just as well have stayed at home, I add when my self-confidence is at a high point, and the view is at its best. And sometimes I have thoughts, before the surge of meanwhile drowns them out, that limping is a thing I’d voluntarily take up if I were just as upright as the rest: I see myself, erect, stampeding through a garden’s sturdy, stale geometry and nearly knocked down by the urge to say incline, I like your style; ravine, hello; how many good things share your curvature; it is the slant of rainfall when the wind convinces it to drift; it is a sight that those with level heads and steady feet miss out on. In a coracle (my new enthusiasm leads to stories), you are better, bent; the more you tilt, the more the water welcomes you, its addled waves a live reminder of your being there, its leaping fish a sign that you are still alert and in command. The clubfoots have a myth concerning Orpheus’ head, and though I doubt its authenticity I like the way it goes: hacked off, the head was rolling down the river, when a change came over it—it bobbed, it jumped, it shuddered, it caught itself in weeds, but struggled free because of all its energy, and then its eyes began to come to life, as if a pretty tune enthralled it even then. Meanwhile his killers marched away, saying he had his ups and downs. Of course, of course to hobble is to hinder: sick is sick, no matter how you change the second term to suit your needs. But sometimes I am sure that when I limp along a crooked street, my dancing shadow is a model for the stiffs who hurry past without a sound, showing them this way, that way, as they reach the little level huts they call home.

I Is the total black, being spoken From the earth's inside. There are many kinds of open. How a diamond comes into a knot of flame How a sound comes into a word, coloured By who pays what for speaking. Some words are open Like a diamond on glass windows Singing out within the crash of passing sun Then there are words like stapled wagers In a perforated book—buy and sign and tear apart— And come whatever wills all chances The stub remains An ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge. Some words live in my throat Breeding like adders. Others know sun Seeking like gypsies over my tongue To explode through my lips Like young sparrows bursting from shell. Some words Bedevil me. Love is a word another kind of open— As a diamond comes into a knot of flame I am black because I come from the earth's inside Take my word for jewel in your open light.

Like finding a bar of aluminum wedged in a bull’s jaw. Like discovering in a sea chest a short obsidian head. Like looking through a padlock   and seeing an undeserved dawn. As impossible as all these, as melancholy and lonely, was it to see the green truck that with the punctuality   of a sacrament delivered the coal each month. On the slope its strained   heart would announce itself vociferously, at the brink of death, and it   would stop in front of the house as if to deliver the agonizing news of   the fall of Troy. And then a man, wrapped in sacking, would pitch   his cargo, resonant and angular, into an orange-painted crate. Like opening a Bible and finding three leaves of laurel. Like lifting   a stone and remembering someone’s name. Like finding the same   snail again a hundred miles away. As impossible as all these, as melancholy and lonely, would it be to find, fifteen years later, the same coal    deliveryman carrying on his trade, bent from the strain, determined   to show the heavens that a man might do that job his entire life, that   he scraped in the mines, that he stole thread from his wife to sew his   sacking, that he dreamed of infinite excavations, of tunnels, and that   they might forgive him for not having done more than that.

I made my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies From heel to throat; But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world’s eyes As though they’d wrought it. Song, let them take it For there’s more enterprise In walking naked.

For I have seen love and his face is choice Heart of Hearts, a flesh of pure fire, fusing from the center where all Motion is one. And I have known despair that the Face has ceased to stare at me with the Rose of the world but lies furled in an artificial paradise it is Hell to get into. If I knew you were there I would fall upon my knees and plead to God to deliver you in my arms once again. But it is senseless to try. One can only take means to reduce misery, confuse the sensations so that this Face, what aches in the heart and makes each new start less close to the source of desire, fade from the flesh that fires the night, with dreams and infinite longing.

Out of the wood of thoughts that grows by night To be cut down by the sharp axe of light,— Out of the night, two cocks together crow, Cleaving the darkness with a silver blow: And bright before my eyes twin trumpeters stand, Heralds of splendour, one at either hand, Each facing each as in a coat of arms: The milkers lace their boots up at the farms.

After dark, the bar full of women part of me loves—the part that stood naked outside the window of Miss Geneva, recent divorcée who owned a gun, O Miss Geneva where are you now—Orpheus says she did not perish, she was not turned to ash in the brutal light, she found a good job, she made good money, she had her own insurance and a house, she was a decent wife. I know descent lives in the word decent. The bar noise makes a kind of silence. When Orpheus hands me his sunglasses, I see how fire changes everything. In the mind I am behind a woman whose skirt is hiked above her hips, as bound as touch permits, saying don't forget me when I become the liquid out of which names are born, salt-milk, milk-sweet and animal-made. I want to be a human above the body, uprooted and right, a fold of pleas released, but I am a black wound, what's left of the deed.

Beside the tree Beside the chair Beside the house Beside the pit Beside the tree stump Coco say don’t climb / so I don’t / I sit & stare — my skin coming dark and burnt They say: tire I say: brown They say: Black Black can’t take back! & I don’t I learnt to not ask where I’m from I learn to listen, then not I’m too scared they gone tell me the things about myself I done already buried in the dark Beside the tree  Beside the chair     Beside the house    Beside the pit Beside the tree stump         I sit       I sit        I sit        ’til no one even know I’m (t)here