18 October 2011

for the contrarian


making the whole process
more complicated than it has to be
no-body would disagree
it matters not
how good you are
what good you do

or does it

is the final measure
more than cronbach’s alpha
more than just seeing
if the same answer
can be had again
are any answers
sacred
is any

          thing

   say
      cred
      sake
   read

for goodness sake
       for pete’s sake

my sake
   for me

what about that
years speeding up
only to slow down
in libraries
and on dirt roads
in locker rooms
in your mother’s home
atop her piano
more for holding up
photographs
than stirring chords
or sweet songs

sing along
   sing
alone

none of this
and none of you
see

the sunset
was not meant for you
nor was it meant for
everyone else
stone stuck
staring at it
without the words
to make a stand
only word enough
to meet demands
of consumer culture
that coffee colored vulture

with a shaker to the right
a stolen glockenspiel in the center
                                                          its silver bars glimmering in the middle

   of it all
the glimmer
   is something you hear
and if you hear it well
   you can see it too
you can make it through the
   hoop
through the roof

   even

and if that’s not enough
to get you to stop calling me
      steven

   then i don’t know what else
i can do for you
                         friendo

   defend it
make a case
tell me why
you ended up in this place
and why you feel such a strong want
   to heal the hate
to set it straight
   from out of state

the harm’s long gone
don’t you know that son
don’t you forget what we told
you when we said that
we know what the color yellow
   is
what the color yellow
   was

what the worth of work depends upon
when we sat on the back bumpers of fords
      always more than one
and just wanted to play golf
before we went back to work
before we came home
from the moon
or from utah
where god only knows what happened
and what that meant

the port in the storm
called itself arthur
but you always said
   ‘author’ like it was writing
our story
from the gulf coast
   ankle deep in crude
            strike broke

didn’t seem right to me
at the time
doesn’t seem any more right
now
despite my red subaru
and three green semesters
for the contrarian
the septuagenarian
   who tricked me
every day of the week



 *leaf cutting by Hillary Waters Fayle
http://hillaryfayle.wordpress.com/

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