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Thursday, February 17, 2005

there are certain concessions

dear Trevor,

there are certain concessions
i am willing to make.  this music
could be a voice speaking to anyone.
this is what the words said.

"i do not have a story
to tell.  in fact i have less
and less to even say to
you every day.  if it can
be simultaneously said that
i love you, then we will.
not disregard for your predicament,
a glass eye peering into
a funhouse mirror - nor
my tendency to tumble
headlong into disaster.
what this is is more or
less a declaration of love.
though i am sure you will
misunderstand even that.
which i am trying to make clear.
at some point i thought
my heart might burst.  this
is so restricted.  it still just
might.  what this is all to say is,
i did once.  when you were tired
and lay in bed all day i loved
you then.  when you jaundiced
and constantly hacked
and coughed and spit.
when your eyes dried up
in your head.  but this i
cannot stand.  your ridiculous
prattle, the posthumous dance,
your business of coming
and going."

i am sorry about your lip.  when you
were singing i fell in love with the pink
in your mouth.  i wanted my skin to match
so badly that now i look like the devil.

now i only want to be quiet, to hear you
sing again.  to generally keep as still as possible.
to speak of the human body and not
to speak of the human body.
things people die and are made of.

A

2 comments:

  1. Trevor--

    I found your blog while googling for my friend and mentor, Roger Kaye.

    Wonderful idea, this series of epistolary poems. A blog such as yours confirms my suspicions that fifty years from now, scholars will study the correspondence of great minds not in tomes, but on web servers.

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  2. I too have been blog surfing, using Ron Sillimans database and yours is the first one that made me stop, and I have started at the first one in the A section, posting daft comments up trying to get the readers into mine, with this

    Yo tiny town word teasers,
    whaazzup with yers?
    I tell yer what about me is
    that I'm dead busy 'n up to all sorts of daftness
    in me own mind.
    I'm a full time unemployed penniless poet
    and I've just been offered a well paid voluntary position
    bein' a global news hound,
    reviewin for the World Poetry Council Collective;
    but it's a bit tricky at the mo
    coz I'm banged up on the secure unit of Ward 11.

    However, hope is at hand coz
    if youse lot out there in virtual world
    can rustle up a snatch squad
    and have a do at smuggling me past the nurses
    when showtime explodes on the pages of cyberspace,
    I'm your number one hack,
    firin' on all the ink cylindrical spikes
    I can stick in and go to OD heaven on,
    you squeeze feelin' trainee corpses.

    Just tell me sister about the where's 'n when's
    and make sure there's a stash of unmentionables on standby
    so I can get in the right frame of mind
    as befits a man of the press at such an occassion
    of soundual splendid texty whatsathingy,
    where the air is usually thick with rants from the great
    right through to the giftless of our too few true poetic community.

    Doin' it this way youse ole cocksmen and women
    at the helm of the next generation,
    means we can mix up the writin'.
    Not that I'm sayin' your lot's stuff's ever stale
    old town ''n new place mates 'n muckers,
    no way.
    In my humble opinion your life in words represent
    the rocktastic tip top nexus of linguistivally innovative
    lyrical investigative journalistic bio
    which is unafraid to say what it thinks
    and offers the discerning reader a real insight into your brains,
    in a clicheless non limp style
    which is bursting at the brim with the spark 'n fire
    betraying an eyefull of the forge
    from where the language of the truly gifted emerges,
    which leads me to believe,
    my sock cooking mothers,
    that you have been annointed by the lingo god of cool taste in all matters chat.

    Good work, keep it up. I would go to Manzwotz blog first

    Sincerely

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