An American Papyrus: 25 Poems | Page 8

created--
This time it will be
you who shall feel the wall of
artificial
Fur ripped from its threads, and your stuffing
falling
out.
For a little maddog on top of four joints
Makes a person see the
unsealed human fragments
That had been smoothed over in time
Like a million and
some bone fractures
The milk of approval had swum into and covered over
for looks.
For me fragmenting came yesterday when I saw a welcome
mat
Iced over and yet I
entered:
Your house was hot and your oven smelled of baking
meatloaf
Although
you had said that you could not be
domesticated.
And then I saw your bottle of wine

Standing at attention before two glasses.
The pledge that bowing to anything or
anyone was
wrong...that people
Were only needed to gain the most bare
Of
physiological and psychological needs (pitstops to
being
human)--this was
gone.

Gone with your hair brushed and your skin smelling of
perfume
For some other man
than me.
Come on Gabriele, the gal that used to chew tobacco
and
Spit it into an empty beer
can...
The gal with the deep dark-ocean eyes...
The maddog gal, grip that wine glass

now.
For Gabriele, you smile at everyone with meaning
You are as together as a
feather when a huirricane is
in town,
And when the hangover's over and your own
insight has
Fragmented you from a million pieces to a billion,
My stiff polar bear
arms
Shall poke and not embrace.
I sit back at this party I am hosting--
My back firmly pushing against the back of my
chair,
And my head and eyes cocked.
You all are the performers this time...
And
Gabriele, you are the main attraction,
Attracted, after this night, to the omni-present
sense
of your
Smashed self; and me--
Sensitive little me in no man's land
Where
no man wanted to grasp me from...
And no woman--
Mended back together in thy
survivalistic polar bear
image.

Becky's Demon
"Something happend.
i don't have those visions anymore."
And you believe with a
mind like Papa believed with
When i told him i could see things
Clearly before they
actually
Were.
His back and forth pacing from those same two
windows--
Which had been like a toy
soldier powered on a human
battery
With a three minute's stand at one, and then the
next,
Suddenly stopped. For i was different. You annointed
me
And cast me out. i was
alone. You caused me to hide
Beside a pitchfork in the shadows of the corners of
the
barn.
Yes. Papa stopped. His eyes moved. i'd never seen
his eyes move
Before.

They stared down at me. My child's eyes
Below--and he aimed his for them as a fisher
for prey
in clear waters.

i backed up behind the pipe of the kitchen stove..
But with
one stretch he reached his arm over
Like a bear's paw that in force comes down like a

Redwood.
my knee aching as if broken, i crutched up
From the other side of the room, beside the
door....
Then, bending on my knees the next conscious second--
Feeling the blood of
knee caps sticking to hay and
dirt--
Seeing the sun poke like sticks through rafters and

cobwebs--
Thinking i grabbed a hold on the sunlight which could
Lift me
Up like
a rope; but grasping the pitchfork--
Raising the pitchfork--
Pitching the pitchfork--

After hearing the creaking and scraping of the opening
barn door
Plowing
The top
soil of the dry earth. Thinking: he would
never kill
my shadowy corner.
II
And in this plush chair of the Bishop's office i sit a
decade
And a half later--a
Salem witch of the west explaining
her
Dull, trembling self before three Mormon men
bending
above
me.
But you don't understand me, as if anyone ever has.
i had
psychic abilities. But you don't want them, so
they're
Gone;
And i'm good. i no

longer believe, Bish'y, that I saw
Benson
Dying
And Yourself rising above the

Twelve.
But You're still scared of me. You only want to
annoint me
And cast me
out. You only want me to hide in a barn,
And belong to shadows.
You call my
abilities a possession of a demon.
Papa doubted i could see; and you see me as perverted.
But you do see that i see...
That i have something with some power.
You and the
Missionaries lay your hands on me...
me who left my Protestant roots so as to be rooted
in
your
Family.
You put your cold hands on my forehead,
Trying to vacuum out
my psychic abilities,
Which i tell you are no longer--
Trying to take away my saying
that i'm okay...
i'm good. Speak to me. Don't cast me out and leave.

Where, Oh Where, Did The Mall-Lady Go?
They wanted her to drop her thoughts
As naturally as her underpants fell, after they
were
Over the hips, so the steaming winds of her daily
showers
Could clear her of
encroaching stain
As she had been cleared away.
They were a function, ignorant of their thinking,
charting
Charts. She felt she would
have to ignore these
doctors and
Nurses in the mental ward.
She would have to
ignore the pacing patients
Asking cigarettes from her.
The hall was rectangular.

Everyone moved rectangularly.
She would go to dreams of past realities
Where she was watching the shoppers'
reflections
As they passed mall's little fountains--
Different types of
people-reflections but all silvery
In the still of the waters,
Happy and part of the lives
of the mall.
She would imagine herself sitting on a metal