pith…

Left hanging
will be a saying
in the destined nation
a millennia or two after my feet
and palms are ripped from this rare piece of pre-owned tree.

I thirst
for better revelations
than bumper stickers promising
to free machines from their manifest sins. Sorry
friends. No rapture will come to your four-horsemen town.

I am that I am
a haggard rabbi with no burning
bush to mask my fiery parts, a shmegege
with a headache and a holey bag of rocks. I’m all
you’ve forgotten and never did like the music you make me.

Eloi Eloi
what the lama sabachthani?
Why the mystery? No mystery really
about a cuckold for a dad with a whole god
against him and Mom nailed clearly by a conspiracy of stars

and moving
always moving
from sung insult to sung
insult, from chicken yard to chicken yard.
Wherever we were, chickens and sand. I might as well be yellow

in Belgium
with dry-eyed nuns
staring down my bloodless toes
while a farmer stalks their sisters. Know only
that I loved the feel of a breeze up my rough muslin skirt,

that the kingdom
is begotten within a sodden
you, that the sky is what won’t listen,
that my lot is but this single miracle to darken
what won’t face me. Did it. Not bad. No visions. It is finished.

.

© joesmith
From “the way the world comes in,” collected poems available from me at http://bit.ly/e2xOL7 (eBay) or from Lulu at http://bit.ly/ecZg4r.