Postcard 87

Here is what is real in layers beat like sword steel.
Here is what is real:
What we see with eyes, with hands, with tools;
the glass perspires and stains the table,
the moon is falling forever away,
and the real miracle is mass and waves.
The real, as miracle, shows no concern, and,
but for wonder, we owe it no more.

Here is what is true:
In time, things move and pull
the space between now and then.
What is true is the stretch, the snap of strings.
You did this, and I did that, and they did other things.
It is true a bullet kills a man, but so
a stone, a fall and rust itself.
It is true that life seeks life and must consume and
every snap and stretch is -- even pleasure -- pain.
It is true I left this hammer here, and left my boots out in the rain
It is true you lost your car keys, and it is true that I complained.

It is true that we have leaders, so called,
but they are real and they speak false.
I expect nothing more or less of them, nor you nor me nor anyone,
but I'll not abide dishonesty
There is real and there is make-believe.
There is true and there is false, but lies lie in dishonesty
Honest is agreement of the why, that
what is spoken carries forth to what will speak again

It is wrong to torture, wrong to hurt, to speak
false against our fellow man.
Love speaks against the cynic's equivocating heart.

Postcard 86

That monkey on my back looks too much like me, perched up there on sharp knees. Old man of the sea, is there no end to his pestering? He pulls each ear to guide my steps and turn my path. He covers my eyes, each hand a screen. All about, this foreign world is protean and mean. His voice, thin and reedy, says: see what you may. I look along our pathless paths and see flowers and nymphs, anemone. He removes is reedy fingers and look: pestilence and pain. He leads me along flaking cliffs and ambuscades. All that is illusion too. His other fingers hold my face, and those he removes. We are in void of sea or space. He leers and speaks: to get what you wish, first you must catch simian me. And though he is all sharp elbows and stabbing knees, he's as hard to hold as mercury. And I feel old and godlike, and I feel young and horribly free. And what if what I would wish would be to catch and hold the beast? And what if 'simian me' is not him but me. And what if I'm just turning on myself, meaningless in a boiling sea?

Postcard 85

When they came for me, it was late night like always. They awoke me from a recurring dream. Do not ask them why they don't sleep nights. Inquiries only makes them hit harder. I do not care if they have guilt (if they did, they should quit).They have only been waiting for the freedom. Law makes for insipid morality.
When they threw me in the room, I was happy. That bright windowless room. I wanted to lick the walls. I wanted to taste the blood, the sweat, the piss of my dream family. Only the worthy pass through those rooms. Only the worthy are pulled out of bed, are stripped, are truncheoned. Only the worthy are up to answering their impossible questions. They may be dumb as pigs, but somehow they can sniff out the worthy. I could not lick those slick shining walls, chained as I was to the table, but when my teeth flew out and onto the floor, I grinned.
I was the least of these. The beauty of a true pride, the confused, the innocent, the weary fighters, the blood-handed and the bargaining.
This is the recurring dream that wakes me as they come already, not yet arriving. Every bullet, every rubber hose and pipe, every noose, every cane field, every open airplane has found its true mark on the best of us.
Is it true?
I sit up in bed and turn on the bright lights and look around at the history that flow and I swear that I will do whatever I do, and I will risk, as I must, with love. The only thing that counts worthwhile.