A colleague told me recently that he was a writer. I asked him for some more details on this strange position and he informed me about the state of the art. Among other things, he informed me that poetry was dead, dead? I asked in horror, dead he replied in all seriousness. I inquired further, and thankfully he informed me that he meant poetry was dead as a way of making a living, he had been taught that on the first day of the university writing program he had attended. This made alot of sense to me, I had taken writing courses before and was accustomed to the University emphasis on commercially viable writing as the horizon within which a writing program operates as a sort of career training. I was relieved because I thought he meant poetry in a different sense, poetry as in poeisis as Shelley spoke of it, as the creative power, the making power.

Thinking of that conversation, I wrote the following:

His hand reached slowly
the blade
as it struck the earth
to open the grave
birds midsong fell
from the sky
their voices lingering
after them
what has died today?

The sun burned
blue bright and cold
blinding in high towers
mirrors-windows
sound passed through
the world
never pausing to become music
never touching anything
loud as ever but silent

Strange Hybrids these days
lyre and machine gun
lyre and stolen image
sells us strange languages
passed the moltenness of form
singular moment
eternal finishedness
O Death! without shadowfall
full rotten perfections

Cartesian confinement
within striated space
the negative algebra of papamummy
absolutely emptied
hemorrhaging geometries
logics of bone without marrow
efface itself in speech
parades the thousand
names of ex-nomination

Our old lady vivisected
by the marketing dollar
yoked to state speech
as house dissent
quartered by force
steaming horses
o Muse! what have
they done to you?
O disarticuated, Articulations!
my body torn into your shreds!


Maybe not much, but offered, why not?