Wednesday, July 25, 2007


The wasteland
Apologies to T S Elliot

August is the darkest month, bleeding the last green out of the dead land, mixing dry heat and yellowing death, stirring sullen leaves with autumn encroaching. Summer kept us warm, covering Earth in oven waves, feeding small fires with dried grasses. Texas surrounded us, inescapable Alamo’s With a hail of bullets; I stopped the destruction, And went on into execution, into the wasteland And drank coffee, and talked and typed for a thousand hours and endlessly spoke out shadowy prayers,
Curving and dissipating as smoke,
Ashen remembrance in the wind.
To you.
And when I look at the children, ribald under my tickling fingers, My laughter and hopes, I know I cannot leave them, to cry confused, before gray stones in the fall. Mikey, hold on tight. And I swung her in the air. Madison, danced as light. My mermaid hurricane.and Chip looked up with questions, that I can’t answer today…and so I must stay
Till the times merge,
There is a time for everything under the sun,
Even this.
What are the roots this malaise, what cancer grows In the darkness of this story? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the night no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red cross, And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
I will show you the gears of your heart and mind,
Washed in tears, and turned to rust.
we who have fallen are falling
'You gave me hope and vision first a year ago; 'They called me pastor'
And so I was
was
-- Yet when it was over, late, from the strange roads, You fell silent, and I no longer asked,
And we sat at dinner in silence,
With a long table…separated by inches and miles and now I send smoke signals, up internet plumes
To invisible skies and eyes of strangers
Begging for home
Orphaned…unadopted…abandoned…alone Living nor dead, and I know nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
An empty bubble on the sea of nothingness
Craig, famous man, Had no need to speak to me, and so another brother Told me to feed my children,
In another field,
I cannot find.With an apology and no answers. Here, said he, Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, the fate sealed, the bills pile up, and I ‘took it well.’
That’s what I do.
I take one for the team…get cut…then cut from the minors,
I understand Costner’s luck..in all those roles,
My biography has framed them all,
In the hallways of memory of The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring. Thank you. If you see the dead man walking, Tell him I bring the predestination myself: I understand these days.
Unreal house Under the rain, I already know we are leaving. Cutting grass whose spring I won’t see, again, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each thought fixed his eyes before his memories. Flowed up to flood levels, and submerged my world.To where Saint Francis kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of midnight. There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying 'Jesus! 'You who were with me! 'That corpse you planted last year in your garden, 'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? 'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
Is it dead?
'Oh keep the promises to yourself, that's no friend to me, 'darkness and silence are my Psalms and requiems! 'and I will apologize for all and more!'

But the inevitable is unstoppable,
And the wasteland is real,
And all I can feel.
Today.

Eating ashes,
Like a Turkish delight,
From Hell.


I live in ash-land as the last ash-man.

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