Jesse Glass
EVENT
If it's growing inside you
no blessed event, but
one more empty soup tin
for seven, & if
it's riding in on a blade of light
whirling into the eye--moonbeams &
shrapnel in the belly somehow melding,
rusting, growing hooks, taking root
& nothing on television makes it better
no sweat-stained sheet
to wrap your head in, shield it
from lion light
you may call skin on skin
if it feels good,
if the song plays loud enough
and times beyond boring--love
or not, & perhaps if it grows to be Einstein
playing his violin at the Berlin airport
mugging for reporters in grainy black & white
or just another angry face & lungs
dragging at the sky, another
finger scratching sweat to blood & lips
lapping murky water
& no Saint
squatting in garbage hell
pockets full of granulated
milk can make it better. No
binding the sun-parched
pair of breasts
beneath a skull
shaved lighter than gravity
will reverse the entropy of
(SIGN HERE), therefore
forcing it to remain
merely an event
among a state of affairs,
flower of brutal oaths
flower of hemorrhagic coughs
a vector of energies
(veering dragonflies
rapidly losing force),
even a butterfly of bone
convulsing on a truck bed, soon
stacked somewhere like cord wood
dried tendons tight as harp strings
yet who will heal those intervals
or stir the mundane plectrum for the song
if it's growing there inside you.
Copyright 2000, Jesse Glass
Jesse Glass grew up on a horse farm near Westminster, Maryland. He currently
lives and works in Kyushu, Japan. His plays, poems, performance works,
and fiction have appeared in a wide variety of journals and anthologies
in English, and have been translated into several languages. He is working
on a prose work on slavery in antebellum Maryland for publication by Ahadada
Books this year. http://www.letterwriter.net/html/jesse-glass.html
Switched-on Gutenberg/Vol. 4, No. 2
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