The next two poems are kind of take offs on the same sort
of a shark image.
The first is rather military--
analysis of the nature of a hero and of the nature of a coward.
And I had the notion that both heroes and cowards
take action in different ways.
The hero throws himself into it, and the coward avoids it out
of a similar source.
"Two hatreds of action."
Hero compared to Jonah.
If I were in the belly of the whale,
I'd praise the peristalsis of my death
and played the bleeding cilia.
I felt like clapper's of my hopes carillon.
But once I have been downed, I find the swimming
hard in acids hard among the drowned properties of sharks,
my swallowed brothers, so I roar with a living dead.
Terror of peace swallow the phrase
because my parts will go to feed the beast.
Sharks and I, once we have chewed identity to shreds
will be leviathan, the that which
eats the carnivores in combat through its bowels.
Sleep in its body and blood I say, that's all the stomach joy
there is among toothed souls.
Two for a coward.
I won a precious I from selfless sleep.
The bells whistles and alarms of dawn woke me.
Oh, I got scared and hung around in hell, an idyll.
Then the flags and brass band of the day began to fly.
The opted I was drafted and fell in
behind the chest boom of the drum or a public horse.
I drummed with him and marched away,
while my true love who gave the word to start
ran weeping by my side.
Fifes drilled through my years and found my troubled brains
coiled in the grave of self, and reamed them
with the shrieks of civic cadence.
Forward I was forced to march up to the point of fire, but halt,
did I win out of sleep just to be worked and slain?
No, or I would rather sleep well out of uniform,
be slapped and shouted at by officers of the day.
And win my death at ease, not in the army game.
But I say what the drum says, boom, the fifes squeal, we.
My brains are drummed out of the corpse and wheeled away.