I AM NOT A POET

Leon Kossoff (1959 – 1962) ‘Man in Wheelchair’ / Oil paint on wood, Impasto / Courtesy: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/kossoff-man-in-a-wheelchair-t00564

Last night, a Nightmare turned round on me, making a man of me, holding me past the threshold of an Old Man’s stare who’d been with me, detritus built up these 31 years past, and so

On the eve of Spring

Into Lucid Dream

Scene is

My Grandfather Holding His Personal Court, the Weekly Family Bible study, at the old shack-house

off Round Prairie Road in Wilderville / In stark house, falling house – I am sat in chair

A swiveling, rocking chair; and then grandpa asks me about eschatology / Oh how I hated our wretched, pathetic weekly Bible Study, (but it did make an intellectual of me, or so they said or do they say?)

The Paradise, For Jehovah’s Witnesses, Is Second Only to Christ

Third After Jehovah, Who is Absent in this Scene,

tell me / grandpa asks / tell me, what will happen when Christ comes?

I turn chair, facing away from his body / my hands folded, I see myself, legs folded,  intellectual faggot (isn’t that what they still call me at home?) and I am in myself simultaneously

Child am I / Child is he / I go off-script / Jehovah demands a good memory READ your Watchtower? Yes, but let me say what this means to me:

And I say: Satan came, light-bringer, and told me that life is finite and I may go on in another form / And furthermore, you’re Lost in this imaginary Paradise of Smug Glee, chosen? No. Not you. Nor me. Gone into the rock, that’s what the wind tells me.

And then I turn back to my grandfather / papa with Shotgun / blows a hole through me

Exploding my skull’s right side into bits / Mind is remains / Let’s do this scene over again, I will Lucidly

I am sitting in chair again, and answer as previously, this time I turn, he has a handgun, I grab it, and take that gun, blowing off his head quick, quick

My grandmother and Cousin, Summer, she’s around the corner from Spring, her name, oh, her name! Agreed. Agreed. Slicing his body into bits, putting it into a barrel with forest green liquid, as thick as a chocolate sea, I taste

it is salty

We put it in the back of his classic 1976 Ford pickup truck, a polished light cadmium green

Hauling body to hotel, police hot on the tail – what a tale to tell – a man killed over split dimensional eschatology! My grandmother sips coffee, awaiting word from Summer and me. Putting the body bits in room, the goo, I take out parts, look at an arm, or is it a leg. Summer says, “Why did you have to take him out, the police are all around? I’ll handle it. I work here. I’ll clean the room. Get grandma and get out of town.” I see her trudge in plastic suit to the room where

He’s gone, this man who touched me in ways I can not and will not explain. Bob Cochran, Robert Cochran, the Middle of My Name Remains, & & & Sigh at Last, into salty goo, and leafy debris, He’s gone

It only cost two arms and two legs