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In My Cave
In my cave I saw an oracle study the rocks and send a morning out to play atop the shingles of a gold city. I found myself at the market place looking into the eyes of a flower seller. I leaned in too far and fell into a moss tabernacle where the queen was a green lily and the king a violet rose. Then kneeling to kiss their soil, I spilled through my lips and followed a bronzing brook toward a great hammering. Just then a royal trout fell into step beside me. My voice said, "Sir fish I am beginning to parch. Perhaps a drip of your insight would unthirst me." "Your parchment shall be your mirage andyour oasis," he silenced. In time we heard the mist from a singing fountain and were expected to strum the spectrum we found effervescing at the center of each bit of mist. We noticed that of all the colors, not one was able to sound the same. "Watch closely!" said the fish. To my amazement, he gathered the fountain into a feather pen and placed it in my hand. Then he knelt beneath a great parchment tree where I bundled him with the bark--to bring him here--though, when I open the bundle, only the wrappings remain. Yet that place is not unreachable. I am there whenever the pen decides to sing.
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SWEAT WITHOUT END Several men coil into the hut. Its floor is earth, the odor holy. Fiery rocks are brought on a metal shovel until the bit blisters. The sun has singed my skin though Iam noticeably white beneath. “For those of you who've never sweated this is about all our people have left. Almost everything else has been taken.” Our fireman closes the flap and I, knifed to nothing by the quick dark, expire into a greater mind to recognize that light of Red Nation that ignites my insides is more alive than thought itself. And there are details I cannot give. Meanings unsealed by the steam I must not refine. Words I find myself singing I did not know before. This is a place for pray-ers and I re-embrace the power of that medium. This is sweat too intense too remember--except the end of Red Cloud's confession: “And sometimes i struggle grandfather for I have been taught an Indian is first an individual yet one who receives strength from his nation people grandfather. One who owes strength to his nation people.” This is sweat—too intense to remember—except the edge of Mohawk's lament: “And grandfather I pray for the whites I hear they once had tribes grandfather. They are now confused grandfather.” AIM Encampment Point Conception, 1978 one flesh
some say we were once detained like a formless puff in god’s belly if that’s true we were as bored as a one-syllable rhyme if that’s true surely our voice revolted as one almost angry almost ecstatic scream if that’s true somewhere in the fury we forgot we are mother and midwife of matter: its fetus its parasite its host its companion so let us wear the moment like a baby’s skin let us love like thunderstorms in a cage let us treat each tree like an original cezanne and for god’s sake let us gaze out as god’s eyes at this wounded world made of one puff one note one blessed flesh I Cannot Begin Let us Pray: For the almost extinct cedars of Lebanon for the dying Dead Sea for the dead teeth in the Mississippi’s mouth for the bleached-to-death Indonesian, Australian, Floridian, coral reefs for the fifteen tons of dementia-inducing mercury spewed daily into the sky for the crudity of Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon for oil-spill sperm releases in every known sea for factory farms where the dignity of cattle, pigs, and chickens is slaughtered for the cold-blooded pumps that thrust ever deeper into virgin aquifers for the neutron bomb, the cluster bomb, and the bunker buster for the unimaginable anguish in Rwanda, Myanmar, Syria, Yemen, Iraq for Katusha rockets, helicopter gunships, and creative shrapnel for the current reincarnations of Genghis, Pol Pot, Mussolini, and Milosevic for mutually-assured destruction for collateral despair for land mines, strip mines, and uranium mines--same result for mountaintop removal and fracking implants for automatic weapons in the hands of the walking diseased for radioactive bullets and widespread silencers for recruiting children to kill for converting kids into kidnappers, prostitutes, and poachers for the drive-by ejaculations of gangbangers for ignoring the virus of poverty for the overweight salaries of those CEO’s who cannot stomach giving back for unaffordable medicines for congressmen who fondle healthcare like one of their aides for the ongoing choking of the soul of indigenous peoples for the vanished American buffalo and African elephant herds for the at-risk jaguar, oscelot, cheetah, snow leopard, puma for the fading blue whale, black rhino, red panda, gray wolf for the exponentially advancing deserts for every river which expires before it tastes its mouth for the designer holes worn through the ozone blanket for the weeping and gnashing polar ice for fractured glaciers on every continent for the common origin of pesticides, pornography, and plutonium for creative assassinations for fake presidents injecting epilepsy into our Constitution for catatonic topsoil for the global success of hunger for shoving fish genes up the rectums of tomatoes for holy men who preach roadside bombings and beheadings for holy men who molest our sacred women and children for holy men whose beliefs don’t even believe them for failing to revere God in the natural world for failing to recognize God in the face of the other for failing to to discover Ourselves to be the practical stand-in for God I cannot begin to express my sorrow |
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