I was surprised that my friend Peter had posted one of my old poems on facebook along with this new amazing drawing of his.  I had not only forgotten this poem but I didn’t even have a copy of it!  Other than my friend DanO/M who put one my poems in his book I don’t think I have ever gotten (sort of) “published” before, even in a FB post! (college chapbooks don’t really count, they are sort of obligated to include you). Very much obliged y’all.

Saturday In Hell 

Let’s stop pretending that more words

Can change anything now

Even if we had faith once

Most wait their entire life

Wrapped up tight inside their tombs

For someone to command them

Come forth

It’s not the harrowing words

Themselves (if words have ‘selves’)

More like the hydraulics of

A great reservoir of power

Breaching the dike because

What gets funneled though spigots

Can not contain the force of flow

Against all our calculations

The numbers lied

Ashes and dust are more than the

Reckoning of bodily fluids

Signing the history of fire

Our own dried tears testify

No combination of

Incantations or sing-spells

Will roll the stones away

Nor lure us staggering into the light

Still bound in bloody rags

Here is Peter’s drawing.  I am thinking about maybe taking a crack at making a sculpture from it.  I’m not a sculptor, and I haven’t really had any training and I don’t know if I have any talent for it, but I don’t let that keep me from writing poetry or painting, so why not?  Anyway, here is one of my other sort of Lenten poems as well called "Pieta." 

Pieta

The authorities in Rome have

Erected a barrier of bullet-proof glass

Around Michelangelo’s Pieta

Still today some become so enraged

At this dead and pierced through little Jew

They try to smash him with hammers and bullets

Even as he lay in his mother’s arms

He can never be be dead enough

To please his enemies, and

Many of his friends

Obliged and blessings.