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Ebook has 123 lines and 12561 words, and 3 pages

Copyright 2002 by Steven Sills

AN AMERICAN PAPYRUS: 25 POEMS by Steven Sills

Post Annulment 2

Afferent, the city bus cramps to the curb and brakes through Solipsistic muteness With an exhaltation startled and choking. As the sun blazes upon the terminal's Scraped concrete The shelved rows of the poor men Hear the sound die on the pavement In a gradual dying echo. A cigarette succumbs to the voice as Carrion brought to life; all the tattered people awaken; And a man spits toward the tire of the bus, But misses.

And as he watches his own spit vanish From the hard crest of the world, And silently scrapes his lunch pail against A corner of a metallic bench as if expecting the pale to bleed... And hoping it would bleed...he tries to remember the angles He and his wife stood to project The intermingled shadows that both Had labeled as their marriage.

He enters the second bus: Its coolness sedating the skin that Overlaps his troubled mind. His thoughts pull together Like the light, cool flow of the air conditioning. He feels a little pacified. He knows the shadow's intangible depth: Its vastness having overpowered him these months Until he could not reach the logic that told him To find himself outside its barriers. As he stares out of the window He wonders why she has left. How could she have left without indication When he has remained angled toward work So that he and his wife can stay alive? In the bus window he sees his diaphanous face--the windows Of the Hilton, where he has a job in maintenance, Piercing solidly through its head. He rings the bell.

The idea of her not home, and legally annulled From his life--her small crotch not tightened to his desperate Thrusts--makes him feel sick. He gets down from the bus. He goes to work. He suddenly knows that being in love is not love.

Earth

I use her earth to plant my seed-- My limbs twisting around the collective molecules, Trying to dig in. Only the obscurity of my body Presses so fully that it is neither Body nor bed nor the intersection of both, But euphoric traction; And then, planted and repulsed, Only the seam of backbone minutely faces her, That bed of earth. With all conscious force I breathe the aloneness that intangibly defines the Air. I swallow its ambrosia Of depth and ask myself Why I ever married the woman. There is void. Then a hollow answer calls my name and says "it was time." I realize myself in movement, parting the scene.

I use what has been planted for the reaping-- My suit tucks me into its structure of cotton; And soon a building will be again the structure Around men of cotton suits, pushing a product.

Lost, I drink my coffee alone on the stoop. She had asked to fix me breakfast But I would not let her. My miniature is one and black. I drink me in when I am not Pressed by the coffee's steam. Cars' casketed phantoms of people Chasing up and down Dunlavy Street of Houston After something--their whole lives after something-- Come and go from consciousness like respiration. The people plant and reap. Who can count all of their Insignificant names?-- Animals that are not created sensible enough To propagate unless lost to frenzy, Caught in structures without meaning.

Bar-Room Buddies

We Mongoled Human experience. We pushed it into our mouths As the crisp pretzels of which the shape became salty dust At our tastes: the crispness of life, And we Mongoled human experience.

The tequila, that Sandras or Cassandras, or whomever it had beeen At the moment of malevolently blessing our heated and Maddening consumption, was what we left Our wives for; and then hardened ourselves on The springless cushions of the sofas of our friends Whom we eventually forgot the names of: The wetness of human experience that we Mongoled, And felt the bladed emptiness Of stomachs that could not consume food On mornings after. But the Angels of bar rooms continually Appeared before darkened stages where, in front of guitars, We played. They apppeared at various stages to the weeks of the years. They came, silently whispering themselves off As Sandras or Cassandras; Stared up at us for two hours; and disappeared. The reappearance of their light enamored us, and we left And followed but found bats that offered No shelter, and often caves we could not fit into Or were forbidden from entering.

We invested our capital In the Silicon Valleys of this great nation. Third-world bitches, in factories, became sick for our chips. We held power. We bred metals and bought the ownership titles Of properties, but could not find a home of the world.

We married again and brought forth children Who were duplicate strangers of ourselves.

The Retarded

Legs clamp around the rim-- The whole seated body sticking slightly As moaning howls come from his Paralyzed mouth. It is after having Put him to bed for a nap, and then the pot, That this woman who would dab the bile From his bed like one who napkins a spill from A tablecloth, does not clean away The substance behind the smell Which predominates over the bathroom urinal And aggravates his senses. No woman to do these tasks, And then to rim her hand Under the butt; No woman to drag him from The pot, After she has had his body bent Toward her for the wiping, And flop him onto the bench In the shower; no woman...

She sits, cigarette limp in her mouth, Thinking that the day has almost ended. And the stars she stares out at From the living room of the group home She remembers are other earths limping Half-free in the grips of other Dying suns.

Houston

In Houston's summers the gods Use the clouds as urinals For three minutes daily. In Houston the Boat-People Come from planes.

Inner-city--intermingled and alone Like its green Buffalo-Bayou Strewn only in the imaginations Of those who run along it briefly.

A mile from the bayou The settled imagination of a Nine year-old Vietnamese girl Allows a mangled brown horse To elongate and flatten out To the reality of the rolled up carpet . She feels the wetness now beginning To seep into her clothes; She raises herself; she sees the old Cuban Walking from the house with hands To the sky, as if to make the heavens appear a little longer In the manner that the downtown buildings, From Dallas Street on, by their Stories of windows draw down the sky's enormity from measurement Both extensive and inadequate; And she follows him.

Apart And yet they both think about the Vietnamese Teenager with curlers in her hair Who yells "boo" behind doors That are entered; The Cambodian boy who To the view of the Montrose area Pours on the bare shrubs, And then strips and pours upon himself, The water from a hose, and that both animal and plant Glisten in the sun As if they have been greased; Falling into Houston's world of high buildings From the descending planes While hoping that the big world would Not overpower their memories; And the Cubans, in house #2 always yelling of "Miami."

They believe that Cambodian refugees Always clean house #1, That Africans never clean themselves, and that Laotians often pour rice down the drains Causing the faucets of the house to stop-up; And that the welcome-center Manager Does not care to bring over a little clothing And a little food or take them on little trips To the Social Security Office or the doctor's office Past 5 p.m.-- But of different seconds in that minute, Different lengths, and various perceptions. She remembers the ugly man In Vietnam that ran from the police And then a scar around his eye Opened from the clubs and the blood Tried to escape him completely As the body attempted to pull itself From the street, and could not. He remembers thinking that the Cranium of an old man is always heavy On the neck, and that his Is becoming like this.

He desires to clasp the gate That is around the Hispanic cemetery And watches the cars on Allen Parkway, below, Curve and toward the sun Become a gleam moving endlessly And instantly gone. He desires to arrive there and Read a few tombstones Before and after watching. She desires to imagine horses Carrying her away from here to the West, And other horses following with her family behind. She desires to follow the Cuban that she fears Since he is moving away from the refugee houses. There are no horses in inner-city; and The Hispanic cemetery cannot be found To souls wanting to rest there. "Este cerca de calle Alabama?" He wonders,.

The rain stops. The hammers and saws peel their sounds from a roof. And he notices her steps Despite the stronger sounds; halts; And glances behind him as shingles fall ahead, While wanting her to completely leave him And wanting her to come with him.

In Houston's summers, At certain areas, shingles like The god's shit falls from housetops And the dung dries in the air, Flattens, and ricochets to sidewalks. In Houston Cubans pack From refugee houses And plan to fly away into America, and depart Far from the Castilian hot-dog vender Of Herman Park waiting for The thirsty and hungered And those ignorant of what they want But know that they want something And so come to buy from her Who wants people to come to her For more than the chips Because the hotdogs are overpriced, Who formulates That she is unskilled

And that a computer course would answer it all; Far from the Netherland psychologists who Stares at her ebony reflection In Rothko Chapel's dyed pool; Apart from others, and no-one, all Pulling alone for humanity to both Come and go from their lives.

The Politics of Herb's Woman

And nearly empty of thoughts--Herb's woman, Jeanie, Behind the Ellison Building standing With concrete drilling its stiffness Through her soles. There had been a time-- With face raised from her age-smelted pose To the ever firm stories of that building-- That she would think of receiving her paycheck so she could Go to K-Mart and have something. But now years on top of each other, Uncountable to her, She continues guiding The few of the masses of cars That turn into the lot Where to park: in winters Conscious of the visibility Of her cold breathing, And summers with the scents Of greased telephone poles And sights of light gleaming off Car windows, she thinks Of buying old junk from garage sales For her yard sales, with the same prices, So as to recall the sounds of human voices Other than her own.

Brumfield

His job was a novitiate where there was no operator's manual With which to have faith in, and no rules But to move with the dustmop pushed before him Along the empty corridor, and then down a staircase Where he could descend to more passive depths in cleaning.

At home he would smell the odor of his bare feet coming to him; Would see the blue under his toe nail that looked like marble; And these would be dominant sensations Though he would be vaguely aware of them. Beneath his bended legs he would sweep his hand To capture a fuller scent as his fingers would flick To capture a fuller scent as his fingers would flick His unshaven face. Then in his only room where the bare mattress Was lain along with his leather jacket And the dirty underwear cuddled around a clean toilet-- Where the Rosary hung on a wall And the guitar leaned in a corner-- he would do his push-ups.

Most of those early mornings some train Would pour its breath to the weeds At the edge of the tracks, losing them In sound and mist of a voice Screaming out, alone, Through the cold and the living. His arms would tremble With the body weakening, and then demobilized, to the floor Before the count of fifty. Through the fogged condensation Of the upper corners to a window He would glance up at the train-- Each car imagined as the girlfriend, Cindy, Or the seminary, which he never Grasped or rejected and so They slipped away; Or his mother, who with cancer Began to close herself off to him-- Grasping one of those trains appearing at the time With the familiarity of two strangers Who recognized each other's desire to remain such.

Oracion A Traves De Gasshole

Descending the nostril as a rope, and then flushing out mucus. He gives the ground beef an air-born somersault to the bag And closes the lid that is connected to the vague light bulb of the trunk. The Gasshole's reflection on the trunk lid Is lank and curved; the appearance of his face With its facial tip of the nose and its greased Separation of hair like a wet muskrat in a metallic reflection. His face moving away, he sees an old Hispanic man Who walks from the area of cars carrying two bags Of groceries in an embrace that could be For weighty children; he thinks "The senescent, Carless, careless baws--turd! A campesino!," And he envisions himself as that: having to pull out the thorns That pierce through his tennis shoes as he shovels scattered cacti leaves from out of the back Of the pickup to his animals; And living in the dry ravine surrounded by houses made of wood That had been patted loosely together like adobes, beside The families of the kiln workers Who with him eat out Land's blessings And piss and shit out onto her graces, But himself happily not knowing the language of the Mexican people... Himself not wanting to know the language Of any people that his sister, Cindy, and college pal,

Dave Broom-Up-The-Butt Echo.

He does not wish to think of them Or the vaginas that are not his to put on Or the illusive woman who would be sick with him like a child lying on the sofa in fever and hoping That in the shadows on the wall and the Passing sounds that are concentrated on her mind One will bring deliverance--only placing the deliverance On him and yet loving him for himself Beyond that need. And while unlocking the door of his car He feels that the recreation in life is also a routine: A routine of sharing and parting, And at the end one is grounded and tossed Before the validity of his own Perceptions is resolved. But he is alive, Now; and he will put away his groceries; Read a chapter of his Biblia, A cenotaph of the dead.. maybe a verse; think of forgetting mass and mailing in his tithing And to veg' himself away a few hours Before he would have another night Of throats, lungs and The air of the masses.

Come

Grabbing the already read letter, Slipping out hot and wet From the bare mattress-- Like Sweet Pea's turds Right before His psychomotor seizures, Only without a softness to stub myself Into--stiff and hard I drop From the cold rim of the bunk . With non-syllables and vowellessness A pitch that is language enough To keep this man, Jim, From wherever The unassimilated disappear Howls "He does not want me here" While its flesh of Jim beats the plastic urinal On the walls barricading a pillowed head. The joke is on him this time... All over him for the next hours.

The letter's impression Writes and rewrites in my mind: Come, my sister calls to our father Like Ronnie's suppositories butting back. Only suppositories are meant to do so. Come, she speaks to me, And the shrink Shall put in touch All that he did to us.

Tripping over Keith's mattress I step out in humid silence And wipe my cheeks. Two cabins, beside ours, simultaneously fry Bugs in blue, electric lights.

Keith, a crippled rocking horse of autism, Scrapes the feet of his vibrating body To the bench where I sit. Sit, Keith; go back to bed, Keith; Go to the bathroom, Keith: In this camp I shape the minutes of his life To some acceptable pattern. He rubs his hands together As if trying to spark fire For the inhabitants Of his imaginary world. Stop that, Keith, I say. Sit, Keith. Keith sits: There is no coming out For him after twenty years This way, Or perhaps for me. The pale gas lamps are strewn around A small area of limbs In a corner of the sky-- All but patches are aflame Like a roof of a tent around The stakes, ready to break off And fall.

Rock, Keith, As the sun is stroked So far into the lap of the night, Suffocating and as good as gone. The folding and unfolding Of a crinkled letter into squares; The imagining of the counselor Of cabin four And what a pulse would have created If her head had drowsed To my hand on the back of her seat On our way here; The general silent howling of "Come!"-- Keith does not cripple to this. He has no sister that calls a stranger back To erase and draw back Them both. He does not say "come!" All hours. He comes.

A Gentleman's Right

He must have thought That there was some covenant of the old That bound each to move around it In a square orbit. he was fifty now, so there Must not have been any question: Lessen the speed at the train tracks; Stumble his car over their ribs; Swerve closely to the drive At a slower pace, and hope

That where men dodge the bumping Of their tails from Parks For a private club, That one would come Out from the doors, partnerless. If not, he would have To go around the block Another time Like other old fags before-- The railway crippling with Its iron in each return raising, Cracking up from the skin of the street; Limbs of that bar's tree Waving down , warning. Thoughts that the energy of youth Had some pivotal focus Made each imagined man to him Like a lollipop, but the parks would not do:

There the man with the smashed fender Might be obligated to 69 A winner without a face-- a drag race ending in the winner's backseat, And on his tools which would rib in. And inside that bar where women snuggle Away their faces in equality, And where men rotate hips on the dance floor Like an earth's axes...this would not do: For there were no friends to affect Mutually and faggishly in embraces; And the young and sensitive Were Oriental and fonder Of the cigarettes They put in their faces And the beers that suddenly appeared Before them. This would not do: Mouth-hugging the earth On its bulge of life Or moving to songs Where the dances never end. He was an old fag and must retain A square orbit. It, at least, Was a gentleman's right And in accordance with the Manner of the fags. The block was long. In the shadows and oblique actualities He felt its length. His stomach tightened In fear of the length.

Transitional Mendacities

No, the supremity of having been split off from A larger entity by being spit out From pussy lips while Reeking pain and havoc Like a living tongue pulled From aperture and den Is not sign enough That he is meant To be sustained As an integral part of the world, Unique and indispensable. Thinking about how much longer He will need to play out the day That issue is not his, and never has been. "The job was done" He could say, later, After the storm. Hand-limp, His broom dance sweeps Upended under an empty park bench-- Dirt caught under The tongues of his feet-- So his paycheck Will come in the mail And become bank figures He can suck from To keep he and his woman Housed and fed, and well enough To legally rape each other in embraces, Forgetful of their lives.

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