Saturday, February 21, 2015
John Guzlowski
Are you dead dead or walking dead?
Do you still brush your teeth
and chew your fingernails
or are your teeth in the dust
with the rats and the holy?
Will you respond to questions
from the people you loved and left?
If I send a hail mary to you
will you smile and offer up
a miracle of love?
God's own fruition?
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Very nice --
ReplyDeleteAnd I will carve my commandments
On your teeth, and make of them
An ivory tabernacle
A rat-gnawed reed
A haze of stinging
Facts, a swarm of dust
And I will make of your mouth a monument
Of light
& broken doves
and I will live all the days of my life in the glow of my afterthoughts -- and yours too.
ReplyDeleteBut if you trudge
ReplyDeleteAmong us still
All answers swallowed
Behind teeth we never see
Here is my pass
To shake some saying
From what's left
Of your jangling carcass
Run with it
Whether wisdom, sooth, benevolence, humor,
Lies among the sinners
A miracle of grit?
These teeth are sharp
Deletemade of stone and wire
the first men used them
to kill the first women
sorrow descended
like sundown
on the sweet world
wisdom became
bene-violence
humor became
the lies we tell
our mothers
killing made
the dying man lighter
a feather in the arms
of his friends
So burn then
DeleteThe ashes of digits
That once grasped our throats
And float the foment
Skyward
Extolling the end of evil
And friends
Until the settling
That cannot root but reminds us together
To lift the greasy quill
And tell
Tell them
ReplyDeleteWe have met
On the plains
Of summer
And left there
What we loved best
The heavy hammer
The wooden claws
The aprons that kept
blood from our throats
Tell them
Dying is a virtue
A song without words
Hummed by
The first child
Of the first man
Who killed
The first woman
With his stone
And wired teeth
And when he sees them
ReplyDeleteThe genesis of us all
His singing, ascendant,
Soiled self
Stalls before the altar
Where their kisses heal or shred
And we, between release of winter's wrappings
Naked, touching in the sun
And the redress of revenge
Wonder of our mouths
From Mike Jewett
ReplyDeleteInugami
gnash their teeth
at frigid air that leaks
from florid pores.
Bloodletting makes us weary
so we sleep and bleed
and dream
of Fuji's winds.
Here there
ReplyDeleteAre no winds
No blood or letting
Or frigid air that leaks
From flowers
Torn from our pores
The skin in your palms
Will not save us
No witch
Will count our dreams
From Mike Jewett
ReplyDeleteThe skin in our psalms
Our saviours
Is the skin that night
Peels from our bones
When stars refuse
To glisten like dew.
Our crossbars bear weight-
Nanograms
Adding up
To the density
Of hearts.
Hearts remember
ReplyDeleteThe psalms in our palms
The prayers that gash
Our eyes, open the skies
Send us back to the rocks
And trees where we hide
And wait for the storms
To end their breeding