Words

I heard them
and regret
every stupid thing I've said
and even more than that--
the acts--
I wrote them down so they would last
and who can know which stone that's cast
will be the one that kills?

I'll take them all and wad them up,
weaving broken twigs in pyre
a tower of my Babble-On
should make a fire grandiose!
So bring to me my tambourine
and take from me my clothes.
Watch as nearly fifty years
strikes up the match in wretched pose:

vellum on the bones of me
a map unnecessarily
white against the night of "don't"--
the second harvest of the crone
a blaze of all I can't atone--

my words

caricature.

* * *

You should come. We'll have a feast.
Suggestion? Yes, R.S.V.P.
but cut the throat of your own goat--
the fire is community,
as ashes take to winds which blow
to mock our fig leaf coverings
of rationale all justified
as reasoning (or just plain lies)
a spectacle of nudity
there, too bare beneath the skies.

* * *

wishes

* * *

I wish I'd never owned a pen.
I wish I were an artisan
of language, as to be a scribe.

* * *

words...

* * *

I heard them, staged them--
"curse!"
Audaciously, I called them,
"verse".
I raged them all.
I called it "work"--
stabbing at my veins with quill
my grievances in blood, I spill

the ink of me again

all of these "poignant" petty pleas
to satiate my selves, to please

a mood

a frantic

desperate bid

to appease the skin I'm in--
the very mustard seed of sin.
Every wrong I've ever done
was in service to The One:

the deity

of

Me.

* * *