This morning when you passed
Me and I followed
You on the sidewalk
Your shadow after you’d passed
Was right there in my way,
So I stepped on your shadow’s
Head. All the way down the sidewalk
I secretly followed,
Skipping discreetly, your shadow’s
Trail, stepping and stepping the whole way.
The Prince was bold, the Prince was brave,
The Prince was young and strong,
All of these things he was, and yet
He did not live so long.
The Prince sought the Princess’s hand;
The King, to try his skill,
Commanded, “Slay the giant!”
And the Prince, he said, “I will!”
The giant’s name was Fumblegrunt
The largest of that race –
Full thirty yards he measured,
From his feet up to his face!
All night they fought, and then all day;
All afternoon as well;
Until at last the brute was slain
– And then, of course, he fell.
For Fumblegrunt was huge and strong,
And ugly and appalling;
And heavy, too, as the Prince found, who
Reckoned without his falling.
So once you’ve slain the giant –
Though your heart be filled with pride –
O once you’ve slain the giant,
Don’t forget to step aside.
Caesar loved the Egyptian Queen
And conquered Europe to impress;
Napoleon, for Josephine,
Decided he could do no less.
The Roman styled himself divine —
His friends took pains to prove he erred;
For Russia’s lands the Frenchman pined
But he, too, found himself deterred.
Poor Julius! The Senate floor
Was where he met his Waterloo;
And Bonaparte proved just as poor,
For soon enough he met one, too.
“When I wear this hat”
I said
“I can read your mind”
“That’s nothing”
she said
“When I wear these shoes
I can read
your feet”
![epWywuc[1]](https://bagofanything.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/epwywuc1.png?w=326&h=400)
He was always just recovering from
some shit, talking his way back to
normal, learning to live in
the present and yanking
the stuck parts of himself out from
underneath the deadfall
he’d somehow blundered into
again.
The Thinker contemplates a moveless turbulence: men, angels, children, women
agonize eternally, leaping or cast
from shrieking Hell into a lesser torment, seeking what can’t last
beyond this frozen moment. Here are long hands, long arms stretched tight of bone and skin
in knotted ecstasy of pain; tight mouths caught too tight to scream;
sleek writhing forms trapped bursting through the gate that swells and thins to let them pass
for this caught moment, too fleeting for relief before Hell draws them back,
back below the seething gate, back to the wailing dark and the company of the damned.
It must be balanced; an opposing Heaven must exist:
a timeless, flat, cool, blandly pleasant place, where no stark weathered bodies strive
for respite from the blasted murk, that lacks this endless
doomed struggle. Perhaps this is what the Thinker contemplates: that Hell is,
and so Heaven too must be; that somewhere men, in sculptured bliss eternal as
these damned he watches over, are content: are blessed: are not so much alive.
The air was cold that I breathed in
That swirled across her scented skin;
And as the air swirled into storm
She stole my breath to keep her warm.
I had wrestled fire the day long
But now the sun was gone
And as the night came on, fire grew.
The full moon watched to see what I would do.
And nothing went as I had planned.
The element of fire was out of hand
And hungered for the earth, and ate the air.
The full moon watched to see how I would fare.
I made a wish for rain to fall;
The smutted sky ignored my call.
The flames ate trees and darkness, and grew tall.
The full moon watched above it all
Until the fire was brought complete
To perfect light and perfect heat:
All that was left to gain was my defeat.
I fed the flames myself, and was consumed
Under the gaze of the curious moon.
(poem written with a found pencil:)
That small perfect photograph of him
From before disaster slow-motion struck
And took him away leaving
His aimless eyes behind
From before his mind began to turn in on itself
Not even turning from fear or indecision but horribly
Turning and turning again because he’d simply forgotten
Which direction it was going before that moment
From before death went to work on him
The way a child with a big cheerful pink school eraser
Goes to work rubbing out words written on damp paper
It’s gone
It was in this locket
I’d swear
If not for this evidence
The empty thing
Fool that I am I thought
I could reach out
Find a bit of stone-smooth happiness
Shore up the present with the past
Then I found it I opened it I looked inside it and it’s
Empty
Contents gone like a magician’s borrowed coin I thought at first
But no
Really gone
Gone like a child’s prank of pulling away
The chair just before
You sit
Bag of Anything 