Think of a time when you embarrassed yourself
and the cold wet sand of your heart
dropped in clumps down
through your stomach.
Start there.
Fetch up a memory of raw-throated sobbing,
when you beat the sofa arm or the floor
as if it were responsible for the
wasp's nest in your heart.
Open up, little glass, fill with it.
Leave pretty sunsets for painters or postcard publishers.
What we're after here is waking inside a coffin,
falling from height, the whole empty belly
lonesome lack of it all.
Don't shake your head like you don't know.
The thing you cannot even think is the thing you have to tell.
Will they consider you crazy, the only one
who ever did/felt/wanted/made love to
that?
Behold the mute tongueless many saying you spoke for them.
The poet is the person who threads out their own veins,
stews their every experience, fears nothing,
stands on one leg on a high wire,
all because they can't not.
Otherwise, they would just be cross-eyed babies
waving bright toy telephones to nobody,
and calling it art.
_______
Music: DJ Dero The Horn
Absolutely spectacular. The cold wet sand of your heart falling in clumps......and the directive to go into the deepest places, which you are so exceptionally good at doing. The high wire on one leg - not many can do it. But you do. Love the baby playing with a toy telephone at the end.............
ReplyDeleteWould Santeria be in the early syllabus for poets, between puberty and baptism and / or drunk driving death ... As Emily D sd., it ain't a poem unless "I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off." Ruff litmus but elsewise you get those cross-eyed babies mewing for milk at age 60. It's why a godawful chunk of shamans died in their initiation rituals. Staying fierce to that principle in a life's work? Savage, savage journey friend, one with so many burning and burnt stages. It can set one free -- long as teeth can bite through misery.
ReplyDeleteOh my God. This is just incredible. I can't quote any one line because the whole thing is just exquisite, though bleak, but how you make fierce beauty out of bleak I don't know, somehow you do. This is the voice of someone who's come out through the other side of hell without losing themselves, by transmuting pain into art. One of your best, Shay, simply brilliant.
ReplyDeleteYes and yes and yes and yes. This is, of course, why you are one of my favorite poets.
ReplyDeleteYou give us the whole mental strip tease that is creating here. Your stanzas are like silver bullets, gleaming and sharply on target. For me the essence of what we aim for is an uncompromised honesty that accepts no pretty poses or excuses. Fine writing, my friend.
ReplyDeleteWonderful imagery, uncompromising and lays the path forward out for all to see. JIM
ReplyDeleteOh the things that poets do! I love this Shay and the line of poets threading out their own veins is incredible! I will have what you are having, but talent like yours is not that easy to drink up!
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