The Poetry, Essays and Personal Journals of Larry L. Dill
New Poetry from Larry L. Dill written in February and March 2008
Passover
We're working on some projects here
feverishly.
But we're not quite sure what they are.
Things need to be changed
and we need a plan
but we don't actually have one.
What we have is desire.
The same kind lovers have
before they make love.
Only without the anatomical
imperatives
Our plan seems to suck
as they say.
We're flailing around
looking for loopholes in the universe
and there are none.
a tree or a blade of grass must feel
drought that way.
dehydration, starvation, despair.
How did the Jews survive?
I can't imagine.
Can you?
The Papers
We were looking over the papers
before we signed them
and suddenly nothing else seemed to matter.
The absurdity of it all
was crystalized in this one act.
How could your whole life, your whole future
come down to a signature?
How could we have evolved
(or, worse, devolved) to this point?
I wanted to run screaming from the room.
But instead, I just leaned over
the papers, pen poised, and said
what everyone says. "Here?"
And the man in the suit said,
"Yes. Beside the X." And I signed
the papers just the way I have signed
away the rest of my life:
As if I had no choice.
Last Dances
Last dances and last drinks
Last breaths known.
Last impulses followed into sleep.
We hate them all.
We hate to go away.
We want to travel
into the sky
without the gravity of death
or even sleep. We want to
be more than we are
but never less. And yet
we know our destiny is best.
The torture of thought
can only be fought
by the scintillating madness
of oblivion.
Where Have all the Flowers Gone?
For Raul Salinas
The flowers haven't gone anywhere.
They're still here.
Raul smiled at me
when I read Bananna Midnight
in his cramped bookstore
I'm a ghost, now, Raul, too.
But the flowers haven't gone anywhere.
The flowers ordained by God to draw the bee
Wound up inside the poetry.
You can have your love affairs
and trips abroad
but the trembling lips of young poets
pouring out hearts to strangers faces
in cramped and stinking spaces
these are the flowers
and they will never be gone.
Age Rages
Was it something he said
or the way that he said it
that captured my imagination?
Both, it would have to be;
but surely not in equal parts.
An observation on the history of religion,
for example, would have to come
at just the right moment
to have its full import.
A drunken Puerto Rican poet
said to me one night
"Your hair!. You are so beautiful!"
I thought, "it has to be the liquor
or the light." But he was right.
That was exactly the way
I felt that night.
I went before the crowd
and read aloud
a poem I'd written
for the old man
before I'd ever met him.
He was gone by the time
I got to the stage.
Time is fleeting
and age rages with its own mission.
No one knows what that is exactly
in the heart of any man.
Shame to be a poet
It’s a shame really to be poet
and not a writer.
The people want a story
told with tenderness
and violence
or indecision
and greed
and all the other deadly sins.
Poets can't relate to that.
They’re living in the moment
of one of those moments of fiction
and cant get out.
Their words are like the cries
of men chained in dungeons:
a very small part of a larger picture.
Poets are the drowning.
Their lives passing before their eyes.
The world wants a happy ending
but the poets do too.
Angels
we were walking the other night trying to stay out of
sight
and you were looking up at stars in a way I'd never
seen before.
the souls of others are as rarely seen as angels.
sometimes it takes a glimpse of someone else's longing
to understand your own.
we came back in that frigid night
to lantern light and fire
and I still cannot get out my mind
the vision of your desire.
Readings: "From a Certain Point on there is no turning back." 3 selections from the Zurau Aphorisms by Franz Kafka.
March 2008 edition of The New Hope Journal
Complete Site Index
larrydill@newhopejournal.com
www.newhopejournal.com
copyright 2008 by Larry L. Dill