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American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin

The song must be cultural, confessional, clearBut not obvious. It must be full of compassionAnd crows bowing in a vulture's shadow.The song must have six sides to it & a clamorOf voltas. The song must turn on the compassOf language like a tangle of wire endowedWith feeling. The notes must tear & tear,There must be a love for the minute & minute,There must be a record of witness & daydream.Where the heart is torn or feathered & tarred,Where death is undone, time diminished,The song must hold its own storm & drum,And cast a noise so lovely it is sung at sunsetWeddings, baptisms, & beheadings henceforth.

American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin

The wolf Orpheus calls Eurydice his silver bullet.Blind Orpheus calls Eurydice his witness. OrpheusWhispers softly into his lover's shadow. OrpheusFingers his beard like a page of his lover's diary.Eurydice applies her makeup like a fine calligraphy.The twenty years the husband & wife are marriedThe wife shows her true face half a dozen times.The husband, similarly, only reveals the mirror face,The about-face, the face of clocks & buildings,The face away. At first Orpheus wished to travelBack to the moment of the cataclysm & changeHis mind. But now he knew it was the chasmThat changed him. Because the man he wasBewildered him, he remained a bewildered man.

American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin

Glad someone shot deserved to be shot, finally,George Wallace. After you send your basket of balmsAnd berries for the girls the bomb buried in Birmingham,After you add your psalm to the psalms & palm-coveredCaskets of the girls the bomb buried in Birmingham,I'll muster a pinch of prayer for you. You are the blindProtagonist of a story that begins, "In my previous life,My work involved returning runaway slaves to slavery,"And ends with the image a black nurse pushingYour old ass in a wheelchair. Can you guess what blackFolk passing empty cotton fields feel, George Wallace?I damn you with the opposite of that feeling. I keep thinkingI'm confessing for the first time, the reason I fear you,And you keep asking why I'm telling this old story again.

American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin

Sometimes the father almost sees lookingAt the son, how handsome he'd be if halfHis own face was made of the woman he loved.He almost sees in his boy's face, an opennessLike a wound before it scars, who he wasLong before his name was lost, the trailTo his grave on earth long before he arrived.To be dead & alive at the same time.A son finds his father handsome becauseThe son can almost see how he mightBecome superb as the scar above a wound.And because the son can see who he wasLong before he had a name, the trace ofHis future on earth long before he arrived.

American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin

We suppose Ms. Dickinson is like the abandonedLover of Orpheus &, too, that she loved to masturbate,Whispering lonely dark blue lullabies to Death.Because Galway Kinnell writes of Saint FrancisWhose touch made a sow ecstatic, considerHow it would be to make every creature shudderIn orgasm. If you got one of your paws on a black-Bird, you'd see the blackbird shift & shatter likeA vessel of ink. If you brushed the ear of a stranger,Her jaw & eyes & fingers would clench on a darkBlue feeling. If, like the bear in a deep image...