Take the questionnaire. I have problems existing the way you want Council Bluffs. An opera, just what the world needs right now, our post-traumatic show, and I can’t do anything to stop you. You’re the stupid muse.
Who’s to listen to? I’m talkin’ storybook Earth. Are you wrapped around the axle with it? My God it’s got me by the balls. I’m in Nithish’s pan. Other than that I’m free. You would not stage this.
I’m too honest for broad noon, and I’ve got some big thoughts Earth don’t wanna look at, I mean in your society room. Have you ever seen an Earth poet? You’re supposed to. That’s what we’re all made of. We’re speakin’ to all mankind. Earth today, we get mad at the word man, but it farms poetry, you know?
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, I’m in a limousine, but let me get more Tennyson on yah and Marilyn Monroe. You think poetry’s got to have capital letters and sing about verses and stuff. Emily Dickinson would agree poetry comes from the inner voice. Slipped into you a mind swell the beautiful rose of poetry, even if it’s not a football field of the huddle of verses that high sound poetry to you. I give you an inner lunch.
Okay we’ve brightened our books today. I give you an inner sound, tryin’ to find your head. It’s all Madagascar. Have I opened a movie on the showroom’s floor? Train’s coimin’. It’s all about them dice watch your hedge podge in where you put your blinders on. Cute animals, eh? And everybody’s longing to be free.
Be not normal men and women, but reach above our kind and show how it’s done, ain’t that the anthem? Movie after movie of the greatest stories on Earth get by our living room with this. Would you believe they keep you in line, even in your underwear? Ask the surveillance movie Drop from start to ticket or Seven Veils, and I’m sorry I’m giving them credit, but I can’t watch every movie in time that littles us, I mean like right now as we’re havin’ lunch.
So many lies are told to manipulate your mind and bring all the bad country to bad men so demon they shine with the impossibilities of human nature taken to that degree. They’re demon bad. My mother sucked me when I was three, and my step-mother terrorized my mind, and I had to hide from her in the woods until my father got home. Teacher after teacher put me in the corner, the kind that hate little boys all over the globe for bein’ who they are, and they had a score to settle with men. Give a world this schoolin’, and let’s see how she acts. You can’t trust nobody.
Now I’ve got a little boy in the lurch taken from me and reamed, who grew up with me since he was five, but I was there from birth his daddy. It makes you all nervous inside that I’m speaking about him in this poem. Exactly. Can I show you the hurtin’ in the machine? You think it’s child abuse or a host of other ills, men bad to women, or a sudden and frank genocide, or tumultuous war. It’s our wrong seeing that causes harm, how we bake bread willfully and ignorantly with the guardians of the universe resistant to change.
I love my little boy, and that’s right and proper, but I’m a White man and he’s a Tamil boy in a red flag zone. Surely his parents must be right in beating him, slapping him across the face, not letting him go out of their sight or surveillance system or visit friends so he will not contact me. Do you know what this does to a child? He doesn’t write poetry. Now buy him anything he wants and wine and dine him. Surely he’ll stay on our side.
What’s the beef you reckon? I made better miles with him, and he preferred me to them. It’s all in the menagerie. Parents got rights over their children’s lives. Just ask Child Welfare. The mother gave them a bribe and the police and paid my lawyer more than I was paying him. This is India and this stinks, but who gives a damn?
Is anybody listenin’ to this poem? I mean he’s got to go with us, how you make a child today serious to produce that child the staple of the machine. Now let’s give ‘im bright airs and promise him the moon when he’s older if he complies now. Study hard kid. Your worth is in those grades, and your future depends on them, and we will ignore your dyslexia by ignoring it, you lazy little bastard. We’re smart can’t you see?
Now this has been shut off, squeezed out of him in a parental vice par none. You like that? That’s okay with you? Who the hell are you anyway, ordinary people? I heard you. The Indian consulate the Indian dear, kick ‘em to give this boy what he needs. For fruit to work tell ‘em read this boy.
Tribute to the poetry of tradition. I’m an art student. I’m blowin’ the lid off poetry. I can’t get poetry right to save my life. If you study poetry you’ll get it. It’s just about our choice words, painting things right. I dare my pen. Let’s follow some tradition, and I’ve exposed poetry to be in the lair of predicament, every syllable counted and every i dotted. Someone on the internet will like it. These Germans, they like system and order.
Picked her brother apart, except that Skeptic’s Kaddish fella, who goes around publicly and discerns poetry, and he can make you meet poetry in a formula. It’s not weathered beat. It’s not the formula he’s lookin’ at. It’s his heart and matter. There’s a haiku, or a whatchamacallit he’s discovered that no one’s ever heard about. A poet has these easels, and he makes them shine with the testimony of word.
He passes the feeling test. He goes beyond words into something else. How elusive it is to say. You know you’ve met a poem, but let’s hand it to ‘im will yah? David Daylight, ben Alexander, measured right everybody call home.
You can’t find this on paper. It’s in the poet’s test, what he meets inside himself to write the poem, a sensibility in time that’s brought him world after world of be the horseman in the room. He moves humanity along in great waves of identification and another brand of thinking that goes for the goal of everything, its reach and purpose in time, how the world was made and why, and can I be pretty in it?
Every little thing is a poet’s mule, the suddenness of his mile (the traditional lift to pronoun stutters my feet), not to figure out and keep, to brandish science in the room or the philosopher with his stone. We must show them to you as they are with their mystery still behind them made greater by the sacrifice but revealed in the paradox of life. Oh my great big friend David thank you. You’re the bravest man alive.
Harm's End 