WHEN i write of sleeping/lives 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 ::