I write the circumstances of my life and yours and yours my wife my
comrades
I write the poem of a circumstance deadly and inescapable
pardon my familiar tone bear with me through my swamps of silence
I can't talk any more
I don't know what to say
poetry does not exist
except in old illuminated books sweet voices of orchid smell from the
vaults where gods are born
I'm poor in name and poor in life
I don't know what I'm doing here
how could I speak in the right forms with the right intonations
with the rhymes with the conjuring rhythms of things and peoples
I have nothing to say but myself
a truth without poetry myself
this fate I allot myself this death I deal myself
because I will not half-live in this half-land
in this world half-caught in the boneyard of dead worlds
[...]
I live I exist within a daily death
I live my death until I gasp for breath day after day
I live an incurable wound a torn tenderness a love turned into hate
I live I die with a land stabbled in the heart of its harvests
and its passions and my misery is ugly and I cannot name it
[...]
-------------------------
This long, long poem, published by parti pris, reminiscent of Gaston
Miron and others, should be studied by anyone interested in psychic
colonization, deliberate or inadvertent...
Alan