Urging words
From a mouth that has yet to speak
Urging sound
And maybe something that will reassure us all
Of this thing’s humanity.
A dog could bark
A bird could sing
But if this thing could speak, can speak,
We will all breathe more easily.
Before it does
It conjures visions of a hell full of unintelligible sound
Of howling and gurgling and grunting.
If it can not conjure words
Our life after this life
Will send us so far from all we’ve learned –
That we will be nothing but the pain we knew
When we lived.
Sound strung to sound
Like beads of things so horrible they can’t be named
Strung together with the thread of the memory.

One word
With roots
With pleading
With chains
With seduction
With hope
With anticipation
With command
With leash
With pointing
With soft caress
With collar
With head tilt
With its opposite
Wrapped up in it like a moth.

Invoking the powers of the skies
Calling on the authority of sun
Of moon
Of stars
Of blue
Of black
Of the patterns that curve, sparkling in circles
Of clouds
Of color that goes on and on and up
And across
Of cycle
And eternity
And whatever rests within it
If the will of what is above
Can not call down the rain
Or your voice from your body,
Who knows what will?

Together with your form,
Alongside the structure of this body,
What else is there?
As a matter of course, most of us pour our spirits
Into the body
The form tends to hold the soul.
It tends to.
Now, we have a question –
Could someone (or something)
Find its way into the shape of a person
(even the shape of a king)
and march it around as if it were a suit?
If it did, to whom would you direct the question?
The body? Or that which is within the body?
Or both together
Making the singular plural.

Inside out
Hollowed out
Whittled away
My organs shaking
My blood frozen
My heart like a hummingbird fleeing
Muscles clenched tight like my fists
My bones, dry like a wishbone on a plate
Eyes dilated
Breath stopped
Lungs full but still
Mouth open and slack
Its effects move through me quickly
Like electricity
Like a venom
Like love and terror
All at once
A lightning strike of feeling.

A sentence with two words
Is most like a thought.
Two words of weight.
The first thing one says
After seeing a ghost for the very first time.
That’s all you get.
When everything you believe has been shaken
You can’t manage a verb
You can’t manage a noun
It’s all essence now.

If I have to hear the same old story
Let me at least hear a new storyteller.
If the song must be sung again
Give me a new singer.
The mind must have variety.
There must be a slight difference at least
Or the simple over and over
Will put one to sleep like the rolling wheels of a train
Whispering shh shh shh.
We learn, while lying on the floor
That the arm moving one way will teach us
Something easier, something more efficient.
The Doctor has said that the brain seizes novelty
And when it discovers a newer easier way in the variation
It will enfold it into itself where it will be as it will be from there on in.
So when you tell me this story
That I have heard before
Tell it to me new.

You may passionately believe something
I may believe you believe it –
I believe in your belief
But when it comes down to it
I will need my own eyes to confirm impossibilities.
Skepticism is an intellectual value
To hold tight to logic and rationality
Until confronted with something one can’t rationalize.
You won’t see me setting out to disprove ghosts
Or psychic phenomenon
But I will cluck my tongue
And “reserve judgment” though I’m judging always
And smile a condescending smile.
I will do this, because I can’t help it
Because this is how I was raised
And how I was taught
But it will shake when my senses overpower everything.

Where is the rest of Horatio?
What part made it to Denmark
And what did he leave in Wittenberg?
Or Bologna or wherever
Horatio calls home.
He has divided himself into pieces
Boxed up the parts he won’t need
And put them under protection somewhere
Is there a piece of him in a lock box
Guarded by a man with a gun?
Perhaps a woman has wrapped up a section
In a red velvet square
Folded it carefully
Tied it with a black silk ribbon
And placed it under her pillow for safe keeping.
His mother, maybe, has a big cardboard box
Bound up with paper and twine
That she keeps in the cupboard.
His father carries a small flat stone in his pocket.
His teacher, surrounded by books and paper
Has placed a bit in the pages of his book
And put it on a high shelf.
He sent something with Hamlet
A little packet of poems in a yellowing envelope
Which he knows is at the bottom of a trunk, buried deep for safety.
So he arrives here now, just a piece of him
The little bit he keeps in his body
The bit he keeps for himself.

Earth climbed up into our veins here
And got into our blood.
The minerals, the plant detritus, the tiny pebbles, the loam,
The balance that is our soil particularly.
Or is now.
We were born elsewhere where the iron is less prevalent
Where the ground is more red
But this place mingled with the place we left
And both get pumped from the bottom of the heart
And up
Into our very breath.