A Poem For D

Religion is That I Love You

As time will turn our bodies straight
In single sleep, the hunger fed, heart broken
Like a bottle used by thieves

Beloved, as so late our mouths meet, leaning
Our faces close, eyes closed
Out there

     outside this window where branches toss
     in soft wind, where birds move sudden wings
Within this lame air, love, we are dying

Let us watch that sleep come, put our fingers
Through the breath falling from us

Living, we can love though dying comes near
It is its desperate singing that we must not hear

It is that we cling together, not dying near each other now.
                                Kenneth Patchen

REALITY

The Stars Go to Sleep so Peacefully

The stars go to sleep so peacefully...
Their high gentle eyes closing the white flowers
In a child's dream of paradise.

With the morning, in house after grim house,
In a haze of money, proper to kiss kiss their war,
These noble little fools awake.

O the soul of the world is dead...
Truth rots in a bloody ditch;
And love is impaled on a million bayonets

But great God! the stars go to sleep so peacefully

                                 Kenneth Patchen

TRUTHS

"Which of us is not flesh?...

Everyman is me, I am his brother. No man is my enemy and he is in and of me.

This is my faith, my strength, my deepest hope,
and my only belief."
Kenneth Patchen

STEP RIGHT UP!

17 June 2004 @ 09:56 am

THE NEW BEING

They'd make you believe that your problem is one of sex,
That men and women have mysteriously become
Strange and fearful to one another-sick, diseased, cold-
And that is true. But no loss of father-image or of
Any other image, did this. Why don't you face the truth for
once?
You have accepted the whole filthy, murderous swindle with-
out
A word of protest, hated whomever you were told to hate,
Slaughtered whomever you were told to slaughter; you've
lied
Cheated, made the earth stink with your very presence-
Why
Shouldn't you despise and hate one another?
Why should you expect to make "love" in a bed fouled with
corpses?

Oh, you poor, weak little frauds, suckling around
Frantically for something to ease your guilt-
Why don't you face it?
Your birthright, liferight,
Deathright, and now your
Sexright, you've lost. What
Did you expect? How
Else could it be? You've
Made property and money your only gods-
Well, this is their rule,
This is what you wanted.
And now they'll wipe you out.

Why don't you face it?
Stop sucking around.
Your pet witch-doctors can't help you,
They're all sick from the same thing.
Your pompous intellectuals can't help you,
They're all sick from the same thing.
Your sly, vicious statesmen can't help you,
They're all sick from the same thing.
Why don't you face it?

No, your problem is not one of sex-
Your problem is that you have betrayed your animal
Into hands as cruel and bloody as your own
Man is dead
I don't know what kind of thing you are.

Kenneth Patchen

SOMETHINGS NEVER CHANGE

In Order To

Apply for the position (I've forgotten now for what) I had
to marry the Second Mayor's daughter by twelve noon. The
order arrived three minutes of.

I already had a wife; the Second Mayor was childless: but I
did it.

Next they told me to shave off my father's beard. All right.
No matter that he'd been a ennuch, and had sucumbed in
early childhood: I did it, I shaved him.

Then they told me to burn a village; next, a fair sized town;
then, a city; a bigger city; a small, down-at-heels country;
then one of the "the great powers"; then another (another, an-
other)- In fact they went right on until they'd told me to
burn up very man-made thing on the face of the earth! And
I did it, I burned every last trace, I left nothing, nothing
of any kind whatever.

Then they told me to blow it all to hell and gone! And I blew
it all to hell and gone (oh, didn't I)...

Now, they said, put it back together again; put it all back the
the way it was when you started.

Well...it was my turn then to tell them something! Shucks,
I didn't want any job that bad.

Kenneth Patchen
(Yardhog's tribute to Mose Allison)