Week One - September 02, 2008

(these poems are from week one of Advanced Poetry, last week)

DisSections 1-3:

Cow as Poet

I'm a cow being led to the slaughter:

meat for the many, no more than fodder.

Pieces to be eaten,

bones to be sold

and traded in for gold.

For these reasons I am maimed and beaten.

At the market my parts are traded.

With their tools I am food that is baited.

Sick of stupid tricks:

"We feed your needs"

then will make you bleed.

For this I sit upon my wicked crucifix.

I pay their wage, they pick my cotton;

and then I, denied the profit.

Often are students taught:

Please, reread each ingredient,

and always be obedient,

And then maybe one day learn the ways of those whose bodies are

bought.

Me and My People

The Flower Factory exploded

and no one in the Olfactory System knows why or which is which.

This is a sickly situation.

One that requires Gospel Choirs chanting to /Hallelujah/

with violins and the violent Hounds of Tyrus,

moaning, "Here, Here, praise the white man but then Pray!"

I say it's about boys who plant trees in their lungs:

the mother's young begging for unbirth.

Oh, how self-destructive the South is.

how wide-eyed and open-mouthed.

The people who raised and ate with my people.

Their leaders who chicken-scratched their names in trees

and forgot tot cross their t's.

And boy, how I was teased.

I was begging for unbirth and they had read the thicker book.

Mine and my people stay above sea level

and reap, reap, reap.

We whose highways have traveled inward,

taking Night Trains in the day

and living for the Great Evening.

And, Here, here, for the newly insane

and neatly deranged.

We who stand knee-deep in our own vowels.

We howling wolves, we shifting clouds.

Last Moments

I stood up too quickly,

feeling the sick in my stomach,

and started marching toward the arched room,

a dark womb.

But first, slipping my fisted feet

on cold tile, miles from sleep,

walking between walls through the longest hall.

And the dusty headboard is within view.

The evening's worker is eventually entombed

by my closed eyelids, after the longest haul.

A fallen boy soldier crashes with his last weep

on a flat mattress, and finally stolen sleep...