Take Me Down Little Suzie

I do not write the rivers nightly
And I have heard the wind in the wild rice
that once grew here.
When I was younger wild rice meant brown, long, unhusked
Wild, brown, unhusked…
Now, wild brown men run longly through my dreams
Uncircumcised, unflinching, callous feet on hard packed earth
Claiming this is not a nightmare!

I have yet to see the devils face
Though I have read its description on the blue plastic wall
Of a port-o-potty on the side of the highway in Jersey;
Black will be the color
Mange and ruddy the skin
Like a burnt slice of bologna
Cancerous mouth in the shape of
Angel-Of-Death mushroom caps.

I thought the last line was particularly striking and
a rash on the skin of a childhood meat?
That is the devil’s face?

The devil no longer wakes at the gasps of lovers,
entrenched, steaming, branded
Only the cringing futile whimpers of the lied-to, shit-on, the amorphous
creatures of sadness.

Dacryorrhea: n. excessive flow of tears.

Why is it that we are shapeless when we are sad?
Why are there strings sewn to each finger-end,
a noose hovering like a mosquito over the nightshapes, the lampshade?

The crucifix doesn’t help,
Nor that it is Bloomsday,
Nor that I am drinking.

Write something happy.
I think I was technically…I am already avoiding the truth…
I was ruined when I was 14. Back then we called it…
Well we never actually named the beast, we didn’t want it to
come back for more
scraps and bones, offal and ripped muslin.


Nowadays someone misspeaks broccoli rabe,
and the animals, incestuous, ancestral
Come loping back through the breezeless spaces
to haunt the poor-houses of memory.

Old me, listen: I wont forget to put roses on your grave.
New me, listen: when will you forget the old me?

Mary Oliver might say something here like;
I wrote a poem in the river, NO, I wrote a poem the shape of a river,
NO simply,I write the river and nightly it repays me with static song.

I wanted to tell you that I am the woman in the painting,
That I too have perfectly round breasts when laying on red
cotton-weave sheets embroidered with endless gilded patterns,
the semen of ten-thousand barbaric haberdasher lovers!
The glow of candlelight in pin-strewn-rooms.

One day I will set myself on fire
And the end credits will go on forever.