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What says I must speak if I am not answered? What then that I should speak or am I speaking at all, if my own flesh and bones cannot answer me, as if already they were partners of the stones and dirt? Reading the Headlines I have a burial ground in me where I place the bodies without fuss or emotion, hundreds of thousands at a glance. I stow them in and as it happens I am eating dinner. I continue to eat, feeding myself and the dead. I walk around in this burial ground, examining it with curiosity, find it dark but stroll with a sense of safety, my own place. I want to lie down in it, dissatisfied with it, true, but seeing no exit, I lie down to rest and dream. I am lost anyway, without horizon or recognizable features. It's just to walk on. At least it's not necessary to kill myself.I'll die of attrition of my energy to live. I know my direction and have companions, after all. My Enemies I know how I have learned to hate. I've turned on trees and animals and crushed the ant in my path. Many a time I've ignored the sun and the moon in my walk to keep my eyes turned down toward the dirt of the path or its concrete and often refused to wash my body of its sweat and oils. I saw no purpose in a tree growing or in the food set before me. I could see no commerce between men and me. Did the stars touch each other? Didthey reach out to give light when the light failed in another? Wasthe sun sympathetic?Didthe moon care? Did my feet warn me of the creatures beneath their soles as I walked? Who held me in such regard as to want to unburden me of my faults and let me live? It was a concert of divisiveness without anyparticular 82 | Poems of the 1970s foe or intention: a salad of kinds of separateness on which I was fed, and because I lived I wondered about all this and remarked on my living. Why, I asked myself, was it not possible to name the faults and hold them as a keepsake for the living? I did this and I survived my pain and everything about the sun was granted for what it was and everything about my parents and my brothers, my food and the soles of my shoes and the separateness of stars and the purpose lacking in the trees and my own divisiveness. Granting all this and knowing that I had brought my own death closer by living this day I thought of such a thing as love to describe it. I greet the hair on my head, chest and pubic region each morning as my companions in living. I expose my teeth to welcome them in my mouth, teeth that stay with me out of loyalty or their own desire to remain and be. I am prepared now for loving the day. I can be hurt and I brood. I may take my quiet revenge but hurt and brooding and revenge absorb me more deeply in this meaning, that my life loves my toenails even as I love my enemies. The Diner For Sartre If I order a sandwich and get a plate of ham and eggs instead, has communication broken down? Is there a chef in the house? There's no chef. I get only silence. Who brought me the ham and eggs? I was sitting at the counter when it arrived. I don't remember anyone bringing it. I'm leaving right now to find another place to eat in, a bit more congenial than this silence, with no one to witness that I ordered exactly what I say I did. But now the door is closed and I can't leave. Will someone please open the door, the one who gave me the ham and eggs instead of a sandwich? If I'm dissatisfied and want to leave why must I stay? Can the proprietor do as he pleases with anyone on his property? Am I his property too? What do you know! I have to eat 83 ...

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