Poem for Sunday May 20, 2012

I started to dream awake
It was beautiful—as I
began
to chant an old poem
on the edge
of dream

Slip past the border. I have
always been
this poet.
Night
gold
calling me to know
multiples of now.

__________________

To hurt the political

Or would you

Come off the
chair sir. Ask the chairman
to come off . . .

You have gone past your
dead lover's marker.

He'll
stay same

who's sane (same old
joke—
ancient Baghdadian pa) . . .

Skimming over dreams.

__________________

Walking the way
long way to go

. . . a lot of things
I badly wanted not to be
like.

__________________

There was an angel I didn't
care for . . .

have never
trusted angels.

I found one of her white
cylindrical hairs
dyed black

finally knew
she wasn't relevant.

__________________

Songs and chants by the
beauty-making
ghouls

to us is given a drop of
your live beauty, to
feed us, who are the poetry.

I remember he caught a pigeon
and stuck it for a few drops of
blood. To sprinkle on the
ground, there in that dream.
It was
in another lifetime.

__________________

As beautiful as
a raven, a fire, a
fawn

the word 'treason' takes
credit for achieving us.
We have betrayed all your
religions
in order to
be alive, after our deaths, in
this space

it is lace counter to scheme.

The first thing, in the
beginning, was the lie.

__________________

The motel for
making sense
is where I
go.

Everyone busy with dead
hands/ voices/ senses

Dead sense swells.

Whatever you want that
isn't a thing,
you can have.

No god. that's what I want.

__________________

Cloister of pearlized shafts
(arrow luster)
amid a lighter green.
Figment
puts hand center of my chest
to say, 'there is a formal
condition to
your body. Aren't figment.'

Clustering moments,
But you know when a
moment
is

Seeing it through.

Alice Notley

Songs and Stories of the Ghouls
Wesleyan University Press