Books: An American Papyrus: 25 Poems
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Steven Sills >> An American Papyrus: 25 Poems
You said that it happened--that day you ran away
From a self you buried underneath the ice-packed snow,
All those cold years ago--when your last friend, then
Had put an end to the Gabriele whom I've never known.
This
Friend, like yourself a Barbie Dame, became totally
lame and
Withdrew out the door when you needed more hands to
keep
Your epileptic roomate
From smashing her head on the floor.
Gabriele, held together by the stitching of hate--
The plastic-eyed polar bear with the stiff arms
That the factory of the human race mutantly created--
This time it will be you who shall feel the wall of
artificial
Fur ripped from its threads, and your stuffing falling
out.
For a little maddog on top of four joints
Makes a person see the unsealed human fragments
That had been smoothed over in time
Like a million and some bone fractures
The milk of approval had swum into and covered over
for looks.
For me fragmenting came yesterday when I saw a welcome
mat
Iced over and yet I entered:
Your house was hot and your oven smelled of baking
meatloaf
Although you had said that you could not be
domesticated.
And then I saw your bottle of wine
Standing at attention before two glasses.
The pledge that bowing to anything or anyone was
wrong...that people
Were only needed to gain the most bare
Of physiological and psychological needs (pitstops to
being
human)--this was
gone.
Gone with your hair brushed and your skin smelling of
perfume
For some other man than me.
Come on Gabriele, the gal that used to chew tobacco
and
Spit it into an empty beer can...
The gal with the deep dark-ocean eyes...
The maddog gal, grip that wine glass now.
For Gabriele, you smile at everyone with meaning
You are as together as a feather when a huirricane is
in town,
And when the hangover's over and your own insight has
Fragmented you from a million pieces to a billion,
My stiff polar bear arms
Shall poke and not embrace.
I sit back at this party I am hosting--
My back firmly pushing against the back of my chair,
And my head and eyes cocked.
You all are the performers this time...
And Gabriele, you are the main attraction,
Attracted, after this night, to the omni-present sense
of your
Smashed self; and me--
Sensitive little me in no man's land
Where no man wanted to grasp me from...
And no woman--
Mended back together in thy survivalistic polar bear
image.
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Becky's Demon
"Something happend.
i don't have those visions anymore."
And you believe with a mind like Papa believed with
When i told him i could see things
Clearly before they actually
Were.
His back and forth pacing from those same two
windows--
Which had been like a toy soldier powered on a human
battery
With a three minute's stand at one, and then the next,
Suddenly stopped. For i was different. You annointed
me
And cast me out. i was alone. You caused me to hide
Beside a pitchfork in the shadows of the corners of
the barn.
Yes. Papa stopped. His eyes moved. i'd never seen
his eyes move
Before.
They stared down at me. My child's eyes
Below--and he aimed his for them as a fisher for prey
in clear waters.
i backed up behind the pipe of the kitchen stove..
But with one stretch he reached his arm over
Like a bear's paw that in force comes down like a
Redwood.
my knee aching as if broken, i crutched up
From the other side of the room, beside the door....
Then, bending on my knees the next conscious second--
Feeling the blood of knee caps sticking to hay and
dirt--
Seeing the sun poke like sticks through rafters and
cobwebs--
Thinking i grabbed a hold on the sunlight which could
Lift me
Up like a rope; but grasping the pitchfork--
Raising the pitchfork--
Pitching the pitchfork--
After hearing the creaking and scraping of the opening
barn door
Plowing
The top soil of the dry earth. Thinking: he would
never kill
my shadowy corner.
II
And in this plush chair of the Bishop's office i sit a
decade
And a half later--a Salem witch of the west explaining
her
Dull, trembling self before three Mormon men bending
above
me.
But you don't understand me, as if anyone ever has.
i had psychic abilities. But you don't want them, so
they're
Gone;
And i'm good. i no longer believe, Bish'y, that I saw
Benson
Dying
And Yourself rising above the
Twelve.
But You're still scared of me. You only want to
annoint me
And cast me out. You only want me to hide in a barn,
And belong to shadows.
You call my abilities a possession of a demon.
Papa doubted i could see; and you see me as perverted.
But you do see that i see...
That i have something with some power.
You and the Missionaries lay your hands on me...
me who left my Protestant roots so as to be rooted in
your
Family.
You put your cold hands on my forehead,
Trying to vacuum out my psychic abilities,
Which i tell you are no longer--
Trying to take away my saying that i'm okay...
i'm good. Speak to me. Don't cast me out and leave.
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Where, Oh Where, Did The Mall-Lady Go?
They wanted her to drop her thoughts
As naturally as her underpants fell, after they were
Over the hips, so the steaming winds of her daily
showers
Could clear her of encroaching stain
As she had been cleared away.
They were a function, ignorant of their thinking,
charting
Charts. She felt she would have to ignore these
doctors and
Nurses in the mental ward.
She would have to ignore the pacing patients
Asking cigarettes from her.
The hall was rectangular.
Everyone moved rectangularly.
She would go to dreams of past realities
Where she was watching the shoppers' reflections
As they passed mall's little fountains--
Different types of people-reflections but all silvery
In the still of the waters,
Happy and part of the lives of the mall.
She would imagine herself sitting on a metal bench--
packages of her new clothing pulling on arms and chest
Like the recalling torpor that came more easily
To her lower legs; the weight of the mink that arched
Her aching shoulders more like a lady;
And a small sack of chocolate stars
Touching her upper neck--
Wondering what packages her fellow-creatures
Bought to be brought home and to whom
They brought them to.
And then, as the locks of solitude clicked in her
consciousness,
Came the wondering of where, oh where,
Did the Mall-Lady go?
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Savior-Searcher In The Bible-Belt
I can see you in those dry moments, then
As clearly as if I were there: staring at the cracks
Of the white ceiling above the bedpost, wondering if
You will slip down three flights to the outer darkness
Like your ex-Mormon roomate, here. Your visual mind,
Against your will, probably thinks about your squirm
That a few moments ago squirmed you of your juice,
Wiggled her skirt back on, resurfaced the lip-spit
Crackup in her concrete of makeup, and wordless,
Walked like a princess out the door.
As the last of the ecstatic vibrations tides you in
the rear
You arise from the raft of the mattress.
Then you cover up your nakedness,
And move to the light of the living room.
And then I actually see you, Don, in the hour that you
had told
Me to step back in. You are bending over the
end-table stained
In the blood of wine. Sunlight, stripped silver from
the grey
Clouds, pours through the window to the table.
To your right a nine of swords card of a man pierced
in the
Back gleams as it walls the card of your future
lovers.,
And the redness of Doctrines and Covenants to the far
left of
That table also looks pure in the light.
You do not see me. Your mind is racked in screwing
the pack
For an answer. You turn another Tarot Card
In the order your destiny is to be read.
Your sad eyes look up
And your languid voice says that you are late
For your meeting with the local Bishop...
A meeting to straighten up your fucking life.
I laugh! In bitterness that shakes my intestines, I
laugh!
Another hillbilly man
Has lifted his head above the rest--a foot up from the
jug--
And has blown his breath into the air
Which 'naps another young and fragmented one
To the call of being holy.
But before you arise
You turn the gleaming card of number four--
Your eyes in a more motionless trance than before.
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New England Washing
(Mental Account, Some day of Gorbechev, 1987)
Another hour.
There is no circulation
Beneath the steering wheel for my feet.
Outside myself
There is the last of the sun at dusk
But like the conquering Hsuing-Nu
Pushing themselves beyond a
Great Wall and through an eternal
Gathering, it is hardly felt.
There is nothing great to trouble me
And nothing substantial descends on my senses,
Giving me thoughts other than the fact I'm thinking
nothing:
Only
A flock of birds in the corner of my left eye
Blend down with the grey skies
As if the fence barricading
The farm land does not pertain to them;
Thoughts of the center line
And not going over it.
Days of Gorbechev, the radio speaks of,
But not his nights--where, one time
He may have smashed
A big, red cigarettte in an ashtray
With an action stiff and slow;
And as he stood up the mattress of his bed may have
Raised to touch his rear, again,
Like a quick and soothing give-me-five handshake;
And opening a window of the embassy
To escape the stuffy dryness
Of electric heat to his suite,
He may have let the cool American air
Attack him with the smells and sights
Of its diplomatic car exhausts,
Grey and orange from street lamps
And store lights...and how
The nation breathed for once as it moved.
The third: road; cows, like islanders;
Multi-tinted bladed fields broken by acres
Of forests and pastures; a black-sun scene with
Car lights; a vision blurred and pebbled
Through the windshield--
A truck passes my pinto;
Muddy water slapping its face;
Its stick eyes smoothing it
To a duller complexion.
It isn't yet Christmas
And I am going home.
My parents one day drooped
In front of all, and were old--
We should be having much to say...
I, thinking like them, with
The mind of the world,
And us smiling unhappily
And speaking none of that:
But a lot will be said.
I am a bum.
One of their hearts shall give in
And their marriage will be a farce...
Even in car accidents the married
Die separately. And then the widowed
Mother, smoking the cigars of her husband,
And coughing them as the husband had done
But in the apartment of the son, might
Visit away her life: I would
Bring her there, thanking God for a reason
Not to try hiding all of me in some pussy
As in daylight the main part
Goes into underwear.
This is their town
Far from trays with saucers
And plates and spoons and forks
(Sometimes hardened in scalloped potatoes
Or bent) and knives and glasses
(Glasses sometime with folded bread inside)...
But forever coming down the belt for the
Dumping and washing...the trays that disappear
In a square hole and come out clean
Will continue regardless if I am there.
Men fuck virgins; a child-worker
Is born and all is holy.
There is nothing great to trouble me:
The rains that drop and drift next
To streets in gutters, take away
Smashed Pepsi cups and beer cans
Without intent, bound God knows where,
But out of sight.
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The San Franciscan's Night Meditations
When I am at a dead-lock
In your rear and the
language of my body
Will not come from
The third element of the soul,
What am I to say?--
'ALL BUT ONE DEAD:
Mexican immigrants celebrating the
Stowing away on a 120 degree boxcar
With urine in their stomachs,
Acknowledging capitalistic thirsts...
Sigue sobre pagina"..
Double hubble
The peso is in trouble
And to Mars
America plans
Jumping over the moon,
And all this has disturbed me!"
The night is full of impulses
To live and to run and seep heavily
Into its dark robes of
Silence and morbid rightness;
And as I, again, try to thrust on dryly--
A log without a river traveling it
To the product of lumber--
and hope to create love in
The smackings of night,
Like anyone else, I know that soon
I am to appologize for lack
Of an ejaculation,
And will promise to have a counselor
Tame me to the exclusion of
All but work and lust.
Sounds of people
Kicking around the
Night of early morning
Beneath my lover's window;
And I withdraw under the sheet,
lying flat with the dead moonlight.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Philosophy Of Rita And Herb
Staring fixed at the rows
Of flowered
Wallpaper a pale gray
In the dark efficiency--
The three walls still absent
To her consciousness
As a shadow of silver lightning
Fades the greyness
Of one portion in her view--
The "schitzophrenic" lifts
up a cigarette hidden behind
An ashtray and the flat ground
Of ashes on the table, which
Skid and resurface with her
Hot breathing. She thinks they are
Continents drifting, and herself
Upon them.
From feeling stiff and pushed under--
Numb to the point of a corpse--
With insecurity enough not to remember,
Even, her ABC's, Rita runs into the night
Where outside of a window
She blesses the workers making
Colonial bread.
An old man in a cowboy hat, Herb,
Is saddled on the wooden railing of a porch
To an apartment complex: seated there beside a
remembrance
Of a young woman like Rita.
And in the spitting fumes; bad-muffler sounds;
The rocking phallicism in radio music of passing cars,
He feels he has to move or die
And gets down
To his pickup.
And Rita, upon dawn and upon the end of rain,
Walks the streets again after tiring,
Ready to go back and confront the curfew-conscious
Group home, and the "zero" on her record full of
Zeros. She worries about carrying in her womb
A mini-Herb with scabs of grey hair
And little pot-holes in his tiny face,
Though she is still a virgin.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Estivation
Weekends in Tranquility Park--
With the downtown buildings, hallways of giants
clustered,
Exhaling the coolness echoed
From the rectangular mouths of doors
Opened and closed by cityers--
A coolness came over my thoughts
The way lack of wind contains
The hastening of Yosemite's flames.
There, diurnal and punctual, she crossed
That small area of grass, fountains, and cement
Which were generally buffeted more fully by sun and
adjacent
Sounds, moving the park more than Bush and Dukakis'
Presence. "WALK" was always lit when la chica
Approached the street, carrying her library books.
When would she, artificial and pneumatic,
Who like Houston's miniature stop-lights
While going to work, veer my movements
To slide off a plane ticket and be led
Through and from burning Amazons
And green-house climactic changes--
Through wasted ozone and my own depleted life--
The breath of her mouth my only nourishment.
Masking tape
From hurricane threats
Remains at the edges of window panes;
Palm trees, below, are hybrid to cement;
Thuc Nguyen's business report figures
Blend and bury themselves as distant sounds;
The staff meeting and this cigarette industry are
gone.
Slid off a plane ticket caught in life's winds
Restless No friends for real
All wanting something from me
The outside world has nothing
Except life-ending amusements of
Sex to escape void
The dead have some solidity of truth
About what happens after life
Even if they are not aware of it,
And the rest breathe in fables
Everything is surely unchanged in
Springfield, Mo., where I was raised,
But none of it is mine
Nothing is ours--humanity drifts along
And intersects briefly in alliances My friends
Are co-workers whom I must expire
My life with civilly
As we light cigarettes
And bitch of no new raises
When would she pull on my arm
Tugging me thoroughly into breaking glass
Of the 12th floor conference room
To fall, putting me out violently,
When I can no longer dream
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mid-West Hymn of Aten
Aten, where it is throned on the television beneath
the window,
Sees above and below and says nothing:
It enjoys the woman secretary and the road constructor
Who from opposite shifts of the sun
Come to it, the cat;
Follow the roaming in its mansion;
Pensively laugh as it clings to hundred dollar drapes;
Feed it holiday popcorn on the throne;
And close the drapes that the cat, Aten
Had opened by its tugging,
And will open again:
Opening below
Where the woman, statue of her liberty
Wedged in a mud layered hill of snow
Ankle-thrusts
The tilt of her body after a moment of standing
still:
Face looking in the trash receptacle that her
flabby
Breasts rest on the rim of and point toward; head
bowed
To the tin; And mind distinguishing between good
and
Bad trash. Her hands raise from the snow-blended
Mixture to push back the hair that was intimate
with trash.
She raises her head and glances up at the sky
that
She had noticed a few seconds earlier; and
wonders
Of the person who would throw away a nightgown
And wilted plants, dented but unopened cat food,
And scattered baby pictures--
But the cold wind pushes further into her rashed
cheeks;
And she drops the gown before she can mentally
conceptualize
The woman's possible image She digs further
and...
And opening Above where
Two crossing jet
Had each made an element
Of a cross in the skies---
A third, now, and the
Heavens appear to play
Tick-tack-toe with their bad arts,
Or do not know how to push out caulk neatly
When hoping to seal out the heavens.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
McConico
Through the hazy waters
Of his hot bath, looking, he thought
That his woman's pubic hairs
Should naturally have come out
More permed like his,
Regardless of her color.
The door being shut and locked
With a rifle in front--still he heard
From the living room a forum of senators'
Televised voices discussing laws of limits
In openness and freedoms
And ramifications. He did not understand--
As the mirrors steamed, dripped
Down from the air conditioning's touch, and resteamed
When it shut off;
And when he wondered what home owners
Had used the bathtub before
And what disease might be
Dropping from the cracks around the faucet--that
The fags would push down the American way of life.
He did not argue that if they were isolated
From the mainstream, their liquids might get off on
any
Products as they worked for the cost of their
isolation
In, for example, a barren region of Texas;
And that the isolated would, by the testing of the
Virus, be proven witches
So there would not have to be witch hunts--
No, he just felt their destruction.
And he thought of his woman
In the bedroom, waiting, and became
Forgetful of anything
But the desire to have her.
They had that freedom. The American consititution
Said so---freedom to live and breathe
And fuck and fuck..
Fuck so hard that the penis would
Knive through the condom
And spray-paint the man's name
On the dull walls of the vagina.
They had that freedom--those inalienable rights--
Her to be banged and to squeal
To her friends that she was in love
And him to white pussy
And a gal that he could call his own...
His woman. And if the initial M got ready
To graffito-crawl his way out--
A problem for the rest of their years---
She could erase it, not remembering it
With any more significance than
Having clipped a broken end
Of a fingernail. She had that right.
Her man said so, and so said
The American constitution.
His shift in Toastmaster
Had for that day ended,
And so now he could rest in waters;
Focus on the bubbles that rose
When he farted; and let the memories
Of the entire day be released to rise and fall
Like the steam.
He would have to scrub himself
Good before going to his woman:
She understood money
With its charm of a cocaine high--
Although the need for dominance
And the breaking of rules
Made her love him
Who still did not supply her with all of her needs--
But the composite smell of the factory and the drugs
That he sold after each shift
Would lessen the good feelings that made
That understanding.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Beauty Shop Motif
Taking the boat two hundred miles
With her Ozark loving husband
Not having the key
And why I don't use
The hair dye she perscribed--
The one I had bought from
Her last time--
I say, "Yes, Honey
And watch her lips through the mirror speed on.
My back aches in the chair stiff as a board.
Have I gotten as old as this?
Have I started saying, "Yes, Honey?"
Conscious of slight pains and discomforts--
Words as silent racing of lips.
Another shampoo is ground harder
In the grey hair of my scalp.
The long gray weeds that grow out of it
Will be chopped off another two inches more
Than what I asked her to do.
In a room of old women, like me,
Who let the buzz of dryers
And loud beautician speakers
Keep their minds active from remembering,
My bored and wayward eyes
See in the mirror
(Now seated in a once empty chair next to mine)
A young one:
Her fidgeting body willfully captivated;
Hair held high and hostage;
Curlers stiffly tightened;
Bulges diluvial by Cylenderic Bottle
Held ungodly above her head
And squeezed by gentle but firm hands
Of a male beautician--
And I remember that the noxious liquid
Dribbles under Cotton Crowns
Around one's head
As the eyes water from the sting
Of this thing called love.
Somehow I want to warn her
Although she may not be a stranger
To being whitewashed
In a man's liquids
And the click-of-the heels logic
Of women, as if
One's whole damaged life
Can be bounced from a mirror
In and to all women
Like an SOS.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sculpting of Winds
It was as if certain people came in. Those disliked
were
Disregarded and the rest kind of circled in and out
But at the time in and a small period out were
associated with
And considered part of that person's reality by
himself
The way a cat brushes against certain familiarities
Agreeable enough as it goes for its meal,
And so I befriended places.
Saltillo in Mexican mountains when the land shivers in
shadow
And the sun stretches through the air and beyond it
With an intent to overpower what is closer to man--
The River-walk and the Alamo and between both where
A Philipino in green shorts eats the grass
Where sidewalk and road intersect. There is a city
where I
Thought I could find myself less lonely,
And so I have returned home. Snow embraces
Springfield's earth to its death.
Under the sounds of the rolling drips of water in the
gutter
I am frozen, though fingers tearing apart the wet
leaves
I pulled off from a tree, wishing they had been
Dry to grind and become the physical appearance of the
wind.
Cracked and peeled back from a boot a portion
Of the snow is removed but refreezes more heavily
On one area of the dead. I stand as an outsider
Imagining myself to allow a job section of today's
newspaper
To become the thoughts that crash along in the mind of
the wind.
I need money but cannot find anything worth doing.
To change from a person to a commercial function to
eat...this..
This day I shall sleep away
As the night. In Springfield, Mo.
The Great God may also await for his eviction.,
Two hundred Indians in Houston bow down to Krishna as
the gates
Men lock around him are opened and closed.
But in Springfield he probably awaits,
His red-sock feet on his sofa
As the furnace blows
The Soviet flag on the wall before his feet.
His walls may have many flags,
And his mind thoughts of glasnost and communism
Intermixed.. impractical thoughts
He must sacrifice so that
He can exist together more easily
With the community of the dead,
Unalone.
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Post-Annulment
Afferent, the city bus cramps to the curb and brakes
through
Solipsistic muteness with an exhaltation startled and
choking
[People are play-things in one's reality! One must
look
Into other eyes or he'll be reminded that he is a user
too]
As the sun-god, Aten, blazes upon the terminal's
Scraped concrete--its graven image--
Making the place an Amarna,
The shelved rows of the poor men
Hear the sound humbly grazing
Through whispered reverence over
The glass-speckled pavement
In a gradual dying echo,
A cigarette succumbs to the voice as
Carrion brought to life; all the tattered people
awaken;
And a man spits toward the tire of the bus
But misses.
[Religion is a lie! Everything is a lie!]
And as he watches his own spit vanish
From the hard crest of the world,
And silently scrapes his lunch pail against
A corner of a metallic bench as if expecting the pale
To bleed...and hoping it would bleed...
He tries to remember the angles
He and his wife stood to project
The intermingled shadows that both
Had labled as their marriage.
[Marriage, that santified legal rape, fosters
The child-man to be a destined societal function
As he grows up in the family unit]