The News Reached the Poet

WHEN i write of sleeping/lived Christ, i see him at midnight in a crucified way, love wrought-out with grace: the blood on the walls, the lusty grief, the artist lying on freezing pavement, like a drunk in an apartment. Always?for whom in whom: for the Lord. Over it, dreams are made, then screams are made, grief, pain, loss, longing, fierce promises of life; a skull. i try to create a shield, clinging to the truth of prose, where every word can express with precision an unreachable. For how can i say? THiEF! A sharp wit?that haunts me, rattles the prophet. i should write poetry. At first, i thought that a rhyme might distract my readers. Then i thought it might frighten them. This thinning armor is the price of the art of memory: i go to my poems now like refugees crossing a flooded river. What is the music of the poet? Nothing, a voice, the absence of a voice, as i write, the sound of a key in an empty door, the charmed silence of an oasis. Even this room where i try to be alone, tortured, longing to die, might fade away into a memory, and this empty room with my dead dead body. My childhood was warm, it was a long summer. i stayed indoors for weeks. Until the evening sky weeps, a smell that is sad and sticky, my brain yelling my mother's name: Hoelun! Hoelun! Father crosses to the bank of the river --i drown, he swims to the other side. i leave this world with the stench of paraquat. it kills all my green and the flowers die. :: 11.01.2022 ::