White English - WHY?

Tongue gone dumb

From disuse at some

Numb young sea-scum's post

Bottle after bottle after bottle out sink

Cold filled to the cork with uncrackable code

So good through the years the knots went

That its alphabet was even forgotten

Me?

I’m head vessel for a fleet of tears

Out on my old man’s bones parole

Under sail only for a hole to hell to fill

With handfuls and handfuls of loose-earned dust

Or plug up level really with anything other than us

And then to toss a dusty rug over--

Lost (lost lost) in translation.

Lost

To a kingdom of light I wish tonight to fall witness

But victim to a spite it might incite sickness

I sit in and pretend and through it write hymns:

Tight-limbed in white English as my one and trite business

Light as a nice fat rice sack boiled in water

Out farther than the house of my father

Waiting in the sitting room of yet another doctor

I taste what little bitter roots this winter has to offer and

Without a son or daughter to shoulder the debt

Alone with the past and prone to regret

Dreamt my death by a knife on a path in Burnet

But under the bedspread, I’m younger than dead yet

Lost in translation.

Lost

Even an opal heart hopes all night

In the bright, biting strobe lights

And bitter cold, as the living set up

To a long white joke told through sun up

‘til the bones and bodies spun around them fold

Hopes all night through the old lone fight

And the bright vast cold, but there’s no punch-line

By this told whack joke for all one’s life is surrounded

‘til the black hole and bodies spun around it fold