WEBVTT

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This poem is a little
loud, so just warning you.

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Those have been kind of, some
of them, a little quieter.

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"Antithetical Monologue."

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"This isn't a stage upon which
my dead and past relatives play

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the parts of assholes and
drunks, child molesters

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and wife beaters,
dragging themselves

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through me like ghosts
pass through people, steam

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from a New York City sewer
grate, the grass which refuses

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to grow above some graves,
their energy plagued

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and plaguing me in
intermittent moments where

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my body and mind try to grasp
our cleaved relationship.

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This is the poem that begins and
begins again where I drive them

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from me like the demons
I don't believe in,

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weird marble frescoed
half animal, half beasts,

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stabbed with the arrows of
avenging angels in Rome.

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Those half humans always
have their eyes rolled back

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in a sort of pain
or terror or death.

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Medieval saints do, too,
a collective response

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to the presence of God.

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There is no religious anguish,
another sacrament as devotion

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to Mary, and the promise
of purity of soul

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should have fed the
starving of air,

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the babes nourished
on a new milk.

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The milk was air.

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The milk passed through their
hands like an invisible smoke.

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The purses and pockets of
the rich, of Catholic priests

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and government
ministers weighed down

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the air, so the air was
empty, a belly of air.

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My great grandparents
and grandparents

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exalted in their own
perfect suffering,

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their mortification
of flesh, their terror

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and pain and death,
their heavy hands

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on their children's backs,
their heavy tears of salt,

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their echoes and
shadows tracking

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around the corners
of city buildings

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and the glowing arcs of
street lamps at night.

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Their gibberish, their endless
lament, their curses, and they

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cursed, I'm alone.

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They almost seem dead to me."

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