ALL RESPONSES |
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Have you ever watched a book burn?
How the cover first resists, smokes,
holds steadfast against a slowly
bending spine? How it stoically
suffers torture normally felt only
by coal, benzine, gas and skin?
The book is heroic. Joan of Arc
screaming forgiveness at the English.
Leaves, that twist and separate
in a macabre mating ritual, growing
hotter as they lose their words
to the big death, to smoke, to ashes.
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The words are taken up by flame,
the flower of knowledge dissipated
into crisp black petals floating,
becoming one with the darkness;
burn the evidence if you must,
but the spirit that drives words to page
is ever blooming.
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The Burning Book
She watches flames
consume binding, page, words.
Fancies that a burning book
may be a burning bush,
leaping into smoke and fire
but not consumed.
The thoughts, the words, the passion
crumble, blacken, separate,
then spread their dust
in new form,
to be breathed in, felt, seen,
kindled in new ways.
Lovely to think
no word is ever lost;
could that be the truth?
Or is it, as some believe,
that burning books
is ritual for erasure,
wipeout, non-existence?
Fires kindled, ash flying,
are not the end—
can be a beginning,
a step to finding continued existence
in memory,
a return to logos never lost.
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On one of those days in early spring
when cool feels warm
I watched across the river
where the bridge’s Roman arch rose like a headstone
and curved like her back.
The wrought iron wire stands taller than
any skyscraper and
a young beatnik smokes a pipe like Castro or
his grandfather used to
but I don’t know any of this for sure.
Sitting on a park bench, like I’m supposed to,
vestigal breasts freezing under flannel nap
awaiting a panic attack or maybe just
a fact about loneliness.
Sitting on a park bench, hoping for
a slow, quiet moment. To be, for once,
at poetry.
But I’m not.
So I relent
to have a cigarette craving.
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As Lydia Small
watched the Bible
of her mother burn
She knew real love
was to feel death
before the pain
of non-choice
was upon her
for her, to know
this love was to cry
while quietness hung
like any unburned words |
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ZACH IS A CRIMINAL
A LOITERER
A PUBLIC SMOKER
AND THAT BOOK HE IS READING?
FILTH
BURN IT
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hard-backed
sunlight dusted,
books replace
horses
spires stacked
like gilded crap
piled on
the
floor.
a farmer invested
in these books
long ago.
oceans he'd never
belly-up in
cathedrals he'd never flash
photograph
train bathrooms he'd never
shave in
the seams of dresses he'd never
dirty
fields of sunflowers he'd never
harvest
with hands as big as
reaper blades.
he used to tell
the townspeople he liked
reading
and in church
they imagined him sitting
in the lean-to
of the barn
his mind working
the night shift
for his body
covered in cobwebs
each black word
a fly, devoured.
truth is
he never read one of them
and picked them up
for practical reasons--
the way he moved granite
stones from the april-tilled earth
the way he moved children from
car seat to crib.
the work was never done,
truth is.
my grandmother says
right before he died
he walked into the barn
like it was a vault.
truth is
it was.
the light was dim
and there were too many
dead things to think about
but for him
it was enough to read
The Joy of Sex
for the first time
knowing right where
it was
between an encyclopedia
of prairie flowers and
Hemingway's The Sun
Also Rises.
He dusted off the cover
with one stroke
opening the thin pages
like a wedding night
bodice.
on the page was a sketch--
one hairless woman
mounting a mangy man.
he smiled as a sparrow arched
through the
crack in the door
Then, a sneeze.
A book of tremendous size that
will be burned
by his survivors
notes on page 523
that this is, in fact,
one tenth of an orgasm.
The well-read
say the same
about death,
more
or less. |
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Luckily for me,
anger festers best in the quiet places. Places
where we know how it's the 21st Century, how
the world has gotten brittle and old.
This city readies itself for the retirement home.
The streets are crooked enough that
they're not worth your time.
The streets are crooked enough that
we're left alone.
Luckily for me, there's anonymity
behind a shadow's veil.
Luckily for me,
I live in Ramsey County. |
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Last will be ash.
And ash never dies,
rather mixes with air,
with earth. Risen as it is
from flame, a body
with head, arm & belly,
and lava so hot it turns
onyx-black, the liquid
of mystery and silver
dog ears. What was
once meaning and word,
strikes now as cobra.
It will not die.
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Gold, the richest of colors
metal, deeds, words, flames
Each wealthy in its own way
one often buying the other
They say that the metal
cannot be destroyed elementally
That deeds will live on forever
in the minds of the receivers
That words once loosed
may never be contained
But ahh, the beautiful flames
those trusted transformers
Mesmerize in the night
fixate to a fault
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Last will be ash.
And ash never dies,
rather mixes with air,
with earth.
Last from the flame’s
arms and belly,
coiling like an onyx-
black cobra, liquid
mystery of silvered
dog ears and spine.
Last as meaning
and word. As content.
Last will be ash.
And ash never dies.
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burn a book
and the idea catches fire
the paper tinder
ignites ideology
the ensuing flame
razes a town
he burned the book
to thaw his cold spiteful heart
but the white-hot hatred
could not incinerate the idea
and the ashes of his actions
smoldered |
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Look, sick Man,
your day vanishes
brightly in the flames
of burning books
Enjoy senility fully
If you cannot weep
at sunset, your eyes
should lament for ideas
of those who wish
you to forget
At such an hour
every soul is thirsty
Fortunate are the dead
of those who forget
their bitterness
of a life without ideas |
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I am talking
I am mumbling all night long,
I have decided to roll down the street
Deeper into the black sweet darkness
I am a can kicked by a boy’s ghost
My yellow flames gleam on you,
I am a peach orchard in summer
I can see your glorious hands
fumbling through the mist of the heat
You are lighting a match and burn the horizon
Which is not my horizon
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i stepped into the flame
without knowledge
it was then i became flesh
a language melting against your tongue
hands bound in worn leather
my spine like so many bundled stones
immortal once I have touched your lips
the smoke of the cities burning |
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Richard gazes at the altar in his office.
He calls it the temple of the muse.
Her photo stares back. Her dark eyes
say she knows something he doesn't.
On the table, among the roses, violets
larkspur and frankincense, lies a book.
It holds her novel, short stories and
most of her promises, now forgotten.
She no longer speaks to him. There
are no answers to his urgent pleas.
He can't write any more. No stories,
no wandering words. No poems.
In a ritual of his own design, Richard
burns her book in a pit in his backyard.
It smells like a notion of her skin,
musk and ashes through the smoke.
He says goodbye to thoughts of her
and the scream captured in his chest.
There are still copies on the computer,
of the book, the emails, the chats.
Richard enters the temple, greets the muse
and prints them out again, matches in hand. |
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Light my words on fire
Let them coil and writhe.
Let ash curl and blow.
Let the cinders glow.
Let the pages be angry
virgins sacrificed
to blackness.
Let the light
from my burning
be seen from afar
out of the darkness
snap and growl.
Let my howl
go out to the world
that I was here
but here no more. |
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At eighteen I am unsure who I am, who I should be;
we burn books on the island, pick tulips in the courtyard
and complain about the loneliness roommates bring.
Sunshine falls against the fountain; I look through its mist.
Trees sprinkle our heads with flowers-
you hold my hand by Johanna.
I search for pieces of me in the game called poetry,
I sit, mixing words with emotion,
stirring them around in the bowl of my heart.
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She’s wearing my old flannel shirt:
red, green, yellow
with a tear near the wrist.
It used to be my father’s
but now
with smoke warding off mosquitoes
and her breath made visible
I’d rather think of it as mine.
I don’t mind that we cannot wash our spoons
out here, because I’ll taste her lips on yesterday’s
peanut butter
and, despite my better impulses
and education,
hate every snake for Sumer;
that here is not my home.
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too bad we must burn them today, when
tomorrow, we can just delete them. |
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Distilled spirits
------- and ashes
There is a new crematorium in town
or soon will be, so they say
not that we have run out of dirt to cover
or fertility that requires the addition of ash
Still, it might be a good thing
reducing realities to a wisp of smoke
instead of all the careful bagging and boxing
and digging and filling and grassing and greening
And maybe we should add a few good books
while we are at this reductionism
there may be a keen distillation, a life, after all
lying between covers that pass for tombstones. |
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It is not the sense but the essence
of words which burn
on the tongue and hang there
about to fall off, as a silent breath
might catch in the throat.
For the most part a book sits on a shelf
forgotten, frozen
for a time gathering dust
into its darkened folds
examined later in a new context.
Meanwhile, society
is trying to secure its borders.
The insides are being purged.
Thoughts turn to poison.
Every molecule of distrust
must be fettered out and into the light.
Remnants of a story now assemble
like military creatures
preparing to go off to war.
These synthetic particles of unreason
back up slowly as though maneuvering
through a gas pipe.
They emerge from a dark canal
to see themselves
on the other side of being wronged.
“Lies all of them,” the poisoned scream
at the crowd now forming around
the burning pile, taking pictures
for posting later that day on FaceBook.
Every last word pops and hisses at the crowd
curling into a ball
awaiting final incineration. |
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The life, unwriting, unraveled slowly,
before our eyes,
as his sank deeper
and bone slowly encroached
upon muscle
and skin.
Today, his motorcycle sat alone.
Some walked up to it, to his empty jacket
hanging on the handlebar,
looked at his happy maps
of twisted roads that he hatched
under his ribcage
as he wove his path.
There were tears in tall men's eyes.
There were open books
where so often
are closed.
There was one face missing,
one book, gone from the shelf.
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they promised me if i published
my story
my family would refuse to read it
you can burn my words
but you can’t burn
the memories from my mind
refusing to acknowledge my past
doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist
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Insidious incineration has never stopped thought
or courage or the urgency of expression, even when
spread from the burning of pages to the burning of human souls.
Such smoke never dissipates, these ashes never cool,
It is only the flames that die.
Such smoke and ash and spirits and voices stir in the wind,
mingling among minds, whispering words
illiterate powermongers never understood.
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I'm done with words, with thoughts,
especially when they are about you.
I wrote this book of memories,
I basked in the pale illusion that all I wrote
would cleanse my soul, pin you down on paper, free my mind,
and even though for a short while it did,
I come back to it and read, and remember,
and laugh, and cry, turn angry but then give in to you,
and again become the shadow of the words
that make your silhouette.
I'm tired.
Tired of feeling like a by-product of you
the real and the one I created
when I come to the pages of this book I have written.
My hands tremble while I place my journal in the sink,
a voice pleads in my mind not to do it,
I don't recognize this whining
and it has no importance, not now,
not while I have mastered the courage
to open a book of matches,
now that I strike the red head and make it spark,
sour scent of sulfur, inching closer to my words,
to my literary love for you.
You dominated my thoughts for too long.
I can feel you shrink... who is powerful now?
I see the flame start timidly, and then,
hungry lick the paper on which I built you.
Feel the pain?
I can't hear yours over mine while the flames
darken the paper, curl it,
grow as my sight grows wet and tears run down my face.
Finally free. Or am I?
The sound and weight of emptiness surrounds me
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