Husband
This is a read along. hit play and scroll.
husband
Bound to tasks, unrepentant, voiceless words;
You there, please,
Look at me for once,
I am only falling.
My control was lost to gravity or mews or the mortgage.
Or the purple tinted flowers
Growing in the ditch;
They are
Gods — all of them.
Stay with me here,
One second,
I’ll take a moment in my teeth,
Will not let go
For anything
Nothing at all… not even…
Because I will speak,
Tell the truth,
As I knew and lived it.
You can trust me,
My words,
I am taken as I am found.
Screaming both ways
In and out.
Same as you, same as others.
What words I have
Are as pained as my mouth,
Corrupted, too
By doubt
And more so
By belief.
When I speak the fires burn on my tongue,
Coals
I myself incited
To flame.
If I speak then,
It is to heal my silence,
To feel again the remains
Of the life I once lived.
So I tell you
Not by my will
But for yours.
In my time there was such a faith
In the holiness of
COIN —
Wealth was saintliness;
Our lord was a materialist.
Themselves the base material
Worshipped and sought across the ever
Open world.
Our beliefs were such.
Our one life was simple, too;
The philosophy was for children put:
Endowments of brown beauty and estate
Are the blessing and earthly reward
BEFORE
Death can ruin appreciation,
Because…
Is it not right to feel in body
What will one day
Be mere spirit?
Life turns to tongues to gold to vapor to love to…
Eternity.
Without the feel of skin,
Eternity can not be
KNOWN.
I was not wrong to engage, then, as a merchant in trade,
In the commodities on market;
Nor wrong to take from them
My recompense
For
Knowledge, time, negotiation.
I asked for form in kind,
Received this as wife, children, home,
A view
Onto a captured helm,
The prow lost
In a gummy fog,
Where it went was not my task,
Mine was the provision
And the ultimate
Reward.
So doing what was asked of me I sinned.
So I am accused.
So I admit.
But to give to your own,
Into your own,
Without limit,
Is the heavenpower we’ve created
And needed
In story and song.
Who would otherwise
Be
If unto ourselves and those of ourselves,
We could not GIVE
More and more and more and more
To tempt greater eternity
To a greatness we can NOW imagine;
And thus fullfil
This fleshed hour?
I’ve seen the paintings of hordes
Wrapped in gold,
Adorned with lace, leather, silver,
Chastised only by the splendor they felt,
I’ve seen these paintings
Entitled: Family.
To search for this was the highest good.
One enters into this room in youth;
This room that finds and forms us.
One enters this room in youth
Following signs before us.
Turn here, there, choose, take, like, love, tie…
Our failure is covered in muscle and gore,
Sex engorged —
Screaming at the air
With air, vomiting, yet free.
Without knowing there are hard steps —
Stone edges, plastic slivers
Scars,
Even the smell is fearsome,
Boiled, unclean, inhabited;
This room we enter lays like an open casket,
Waiting.
And we are bid, demanded
To take that step
And lame ourselves.
One would never enter if one would ever know.
Yet the start is clean like
Cracks and ice and old legends.
Without knowing,
What accidents can befall you? None.
And so we enter.
Without knowing,
Concrete and wood leave no trace,
Without knowing
Shame abstains from the onslaught,
And loneliness,
But without knowing. There are None.
Without knowing,
My curling body was only real among
The writhing mass of other bodies,
A den of snakes opening up
To the humid spring air,
Not aware
But splitting along a painful, joyous
Seam…
Always the missing parts sought.
Always more.
I have loved that greed.
Felt it whole
As a second heart in my chest.
I have made of it signs and posts,
Licked it when present
Savoring the salty stone, the pebbles,
In my hand, mouth, throat.
All of me was out there somewhere.
Without knowing.
It was impossible not to seek ME.
I was made of early forever joys that could not be wasted. I had loved this early greed.
I was confined to forms I could not describe; I admit.
It is hard to spur compassion for
Reams of paper, bound tomes,
Annals, almanacs, price guides,
Interest cards, indexes, accordance rates,
Historical forms, actuary tables,
Empires once, vast corporates, mines and wells
The ground, our lungs,
An entire body
On the present market;
The ever-fed deity
Rested in our minds,
The writhing mass, other bodies, cracks, ice, old legends —
Every form we took was an attempt
To once more reach those forms,
To find our whole
Among the mass.
Ceaseless, never ending, but one does
Without knowing.
I moved from fingers to formulas with speed,
Understanding all maner luxurious,
Consumable.
Understanding all manner
Secure, holding us in place;
It was just as I held my family
In rooms they entered without knowing,
Loved
And hated.
I gave my children faces…
Where is my fault?
Doing what was asked of me I sinned.
So I am accused.
So I admit.
Where there is greed
There is another constant,
Mumbles; always of:
Vanity, putrescent, pride, panderer, evil, glutton
From those who did not share
The same religion.
These were the echos in which we lived.
But what was not real,
Not stone in hand,
Jewel in hand,
Not son, mother, daughter, father,
Each in hand in hand,
What was not the temple fortress,
The ivory sword,
The lavish joy we lived in,
Protected;
If these were not real,
We were not reality.
Our philosophy proves it:
If we are not real
Then what we touch is not real,
And we are already in eternity.
I remember the verse: each god in man
Every tithe by hand
Is bent to this same sight,
The good from greed is our natural essence.
So said all
In action and deed.
For every child sold a family was fed,
Whether flesh from man, animal, or other.
With a priced ego or organ,
Another worthy lived
Even if
The old or stricken may die.
In our voice, in the words we sang,
From gilt belts hung —
No sword
Was as destructive
As our desire to live.
All life exists at the cost of other lives.
I have not spoken to beg,
Forgiveness cannot be held in the palm
And stroked for hours,
Its glitter and smooth surface entrancing,
Freeing.
I have not spoken to prove,
For there are no reasons left
Since a separate knowledge has come;
I can speak in the face with new revelations,
But could not have before
Without knowing
What is now common and repeated and
Suffered through.
I speak to lift the words from where they sit,
Large burning things on my tongue,
Ancient things,
Old legends,
Feelings thrown out of feeling:
What do I do, what do I do with these things?
These things that cannot be felt
Under the body,
A harness, cushion, home,
An anchor for…
For everything floating above.
I speak to stop you and say
Listen:
The picture is already composed,
So what of my habits?
Were they not true?
Were they not lived in?
They were. They were absolutes.
True to the one rule.
More and more.
Why then, if I hold belief,
Should I also burden myself
With guilt?
I speak to stop you and say
Think on eternity.
Think if it were here, if this were it, I at your feet, you above,
Looking down and no change, no rock
Could shatter the glass between this place
And a TRUE place of suffering;
Think on eternity.
Think how you are not certain
Or secure
In the bricks lying about
Or in the time passing,
The acts, wishes, desires, patience…
Think on eternity
And ask,
If this is it,
What would I not feel?
What could I not feel?
Think on eternity
And know that
Without knowing,
We are not real
Then what we touch is not real,
And we are already in eternity.
