I have to read one poem for Bruce McGrew.
He asked me to read it.
It's called "The Long Bells."
"Dream, please no favors.
Your last one, the wings closing.
The spirit lady, the blue was too much for me.
I'd like to not to know things like that anymore.
I'm not Superman.
It hurts me.
I'd like to live in a cigarette advertisement.
I'd like to just walk out and beat my belly like a drum,
until they scratch my name off.
Dream, I want to get dark like you.
I want to live with the people named
star, who get worn down to the moon by jump ropes
and being unfolded.
Is there anything that would come through like a mountain
and look, and go back and take that long?
I want that one.
I have never said no more dream, but I am now.
No more please, No more.
I mean it."
"All the while you're growing up, you
try to catch up with your body.
You try to fill it.
Try to be big enough to be in your heart, and your balls
and your brain at the same time.
And when you don't, you feel sick all over.
Then you learn how to love, filling and emptying, filling
and emptying.
Then how to not love, when you don't mean it.
And then to not even want to be loved, when you don't yourself.
I thought that was where God started.
I really did.
When you could force yourself to forget yourself for once,
then you would fill with yourself,
because it wasn't for you, but for just being human
and that's God, but it didn't happen.
I'm even less.
I used to be able at least to jam my whole cock and float in,
and there'd be silence and nothing.
Now I might as well be alive and one poor
or one black molar.
I roll through myself like a dead seed,
and the ground's dead.
And there's no God, or God is somewhere in the seed
the way I am in myself.
Who holds you?
Everything dead.
Everything like the stone you put in your mouth
to make spit when there's no water,
and they follow you to your body.
The ants have made shit of you.
The sky swells through you.
Night, morning, everything, everyone
crying, why aren't you here?
And you hear on the tongue into the flesh, I am, I am."
I hope they're going out to see the basketball game,
and not because they didn't like my poem.