JIM COHN
| I fit the profile of the person secret police look for, I challenge the proof we're God's descendants. Here are my tendencies toward abrupt interrogation— I do not speak of life as it could have been, I believe most men die of remedy, not illness. Uninvited guest, who does nothing to block off areas Others wish not to acknowledge, I fit the profile of multitude lost visions—motherloads, Motherboards—everybody's already dead. Pushed into my body, the profile of my warehouse fills With trumpets & deltas & burning babies & wallets. Changing the profile of planets—this the device Of my intimate skeleton. |
4 February 2000
I STEP OFF ONTO MY FAITH
after
Shelley
| The viewless & invisible Consequence Unveils every new-born deed, and thoughts More ghastly than those deeds, & hope that is the sick despair of good, & calm that is not what life was. In my own heart I saw the hearts of others Armed to bear thrones & courts, The price prefixed by selfishness, Devotion to tenderness afar from sorrow, Eyes that see their own delight, Friends, as few have ever been, Errorless guards of a nation's rage, Bliss across vast discordant spans. The world should listen as I am listening now. |
15 February 2000
| In the important circle of grilled cheese sandwiches, The anatomy of loneliness can't even afford to make Good on last life's meat debts let alone the price of Global firestorms, the price of defeating candidates, The price of defeating the enslavers of the world, The price of turned down appeals from death row. You're sleeping on piles of old coats in candylands Of the famous fuckfaces of history—the whole thing Exploding in its enormous complexity—everyone Hanging on to the pulse earth judgment—shoeless & flying with thirteen eagles in this We Are Who There Is shower of headfirst moaning skewered to The universe that cares not what happens to you & Eternity that disposes its evil in vestments of larks. |
7 March 2000
| Ghost train of Revolutionary Mind— Injustice to none, no life, no matter how small. We the people, beaten from light to flesh, Are given to punishment cruel & unusual Though by love sealed. Awareness continues without publicity Homeless & Haunted, though Thou art not fled Nor mere dreaming amid corridors & ambassadors. The seed splits the cliff edge. Sweetness enters the heart. All symbols only symbols of revolution Already in progress, perfecting from within, faster Than a thousand years of savages against maniacs. My calendar of Peace is abundant, Unceasing, improvised as rays of the sun. I have no need to be known, only to shape my scars To the grief above the crumbling casinos Where anguished panhandlers in the gypsy hours go On unspeakable freeways that lead to no country, Serene as the paradise of your own true nature. |
1 January 2000