wordplayground

1
With windscreen wipers
(Unlike drive-belts or footwear,
or chameleons' tongues)
Low adhesion is advised.

But for this end of century
Wipers should be given
Some adhesive stubbornness to turn
Grand vision into rhythm
Light into rubber
Narrative into epigram
These being more useful inclinations, I think,
At this end of a bad millennium

To learn how to speak
With the voices of the land,
To parse the speech in its rivers,
To catch in the inarticulate grunt
Stammer, call, cry, babble, tongue's knot
A sense of the stoneness of these stones
From which all words are cut.

GREAT GOD
I sometimes wonder how strong you are
what awful cosmic tension
throbs inside your restless brain
why in the scheme of conception
did you include pain

If we could meet on even terms
man to man
you stripped of power
I of fear,
I'd lift my shirt and show you scars
wide as the moon, black as the stars.

If only we could meet
in the ghetto or in the street
you stripped of the power of death
I of its fear,
I'd go away from you
and you would cry to have me back
Perhaps I shall return to wipe your eyes
for we could not have a God that cries 

Bless the children of South Africa
The white children
And the black children
But more the black children
Who lost the sea and sand
That they may not lose love
For white children
Whose fathers raped the land...

Something strange I do not comprehend
Is this: I start to write a certain verse
But by the time that I come to its end
Another has been written that is worse
Or possibly better than the one I meant
And certainly not the same, and different.

I cannot understand it--I begin
A poem and then it changes as I write,
Never have I written the one I thought I might,
Never gone out the door that I came in,
Until I am perplexed by this perverse
Manner and behavior in my verse.

I've never written the poem that I intended;
The poem was always different when it ended.

unless there's one thing seen
suddenly against another--a parsnip
sprouting for a President, or
hailstones melting in an ashtray--
nothing really happens. It takes
surprise and wild connections,
doesn't it? A walrus chewing
on a ballpoint pen. Two blue tail-
lights on Tyrannosaurus Rex. Green
cheese teeth. Maybe what we wanted
least. Or most. Some unexpected
pleats. Words that never knew
each other till right now. Plug us
into the wrong socket and see
what blows--or what lights up.
Try
        untried
                 circuitry,
    new
          fuses.
    Tell it like it never really was,
    man,
    and maybe we can seeit
    like it is.

I once found a man
  sitting under a tree
at the edge of a river
        that had no name.
I asked him
        if the river flowed free.
He said,
        I am

Angry with my poem because
it played the hunchback,
pretended to be mute
and walked sideways like
a crab, I cursed it as we
fought in the desert
where it had brought me.
We scratched, bit, kicked
and hit. It spat into
my face, and I seized it
by the throat with a 
wild shout and squeezed,
murder in heart and hand.
It leapt into my mouth
and refused to come out.
Bleeding, I fell weary on
the sand and wept with loss.
Then my poem emerged into
the day, put a fine-formed
foot upon my chest and leaned
as perfect as a desert rose
to kiss me where I lay.

CROSS the hands over the breast here--so.
Straighten the legs a little more--so.
And call for the wagon to come and take her home.
Her mother will cry some and so will her sisters and
brothers.
But all of the others got down and they are safe and
this is the only one of the factory girls who
wasn't lucky in making the jump when the fire broke.
It is the hand of God and the lack of fire escapes.

A MAN saw the whole world as a grinning skull and
cross-bones. The rose flesh of life shriveled from all
faces. Nothing counts. Everything is a fake. Dust to
dust and ashes to ashes and then an old darkness and a
useless silence. So he saw it all. Then he went to a
Mischa Elman concert. Two hours waves of sound beat
on his eardrums. Music washed something or other
inside him. Music broke down and rebuilt something or
other in his head and heart. He joined in five encores
for the young Russian Jew with the fiddle. When he
got outside his heels hit the sidewalk a new way. He
was the same man in the same world as before. Only
there was a singing fire and a climb of roses everlastingly
over the world he looked on.