Three Vernacular Poems: Death, Subway, Grave!

2006/3/13 15:48:01

Death

Carrying life's curse as a game
expressing the inexpressible expression
Death has nothing to do with you and me
The instant of love
fragments of life
indivisible fantasy fantasizing about the ultimate

Life
expressing the inexpressible meaning
The ultimate flower has no seed
The seed has nothing to do with the flower
Yet the unrelated and the unrelated have far too much relation
Life's curse plays with death
Death — that swarm of mosquitoes on life's great pile of dung

Mosquito-like words chase the stench upon the dung
Flowers — seeds of fantasy
The ultimate withering is not the flower's premise
Life has nothing to do with death
Death's game brings life's curse
The instant of love — the relation of the unrelated
chasing words and mosquitoes

What cannot be expressed has already expressed too much
Life's game continues
Every instant
flowers become flowers
seeds bring seeds
including death
and all stories related or unrelated to death

Subway

Corpses carload after carload
squirming along the intestinal walls
On the city's horizon
corpses gather and scatter like smoke

Sardine cans
filled with every kind of stench
every kind of posture
dead-quiet clamor

Underground tombs
feeding implements clattering
perpetual dawn

Lies without daggers
night is murdered
crimson dawn
sealing the earth's eyes

Squirming clamoring
feeding corpses
hell is too crowded
heaven has caved in
dawn's lie
murders the night

Daggers crimson
the smell of blood
death's tomb
sardines maintain
every posture

Smoke
    mist
        disperses
            away

Night black as ever

Grave

Carrying the grave walking toward
the four seasons and the North Pole
Walking toward the moon and the flood and
the knowable and unknowable existence

Truth
has always been a joke
Existence within the joke
feeds on truth

The sun rolling in one's hand
wiping away the night for the sake of
so-called light blood
staining the years history
changing colors yet
the taste always the same

Graves are always the same too
whether half-round or triangular
the filling inside
is rarely different

On history's streets
truth's buns continue to be peddled
the peddlers, batch after batch, become filling
one after another
not a single one missed

Truth transcends death
The grave protests
its gaze cunning