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The Audited Heart
Words went up to the front and fought and were wounded
And died and returned home and were paralyzed -
The slippery survivors parsed together so that we may listen
To their swords
The clatter
That's where the teeth are, not in the mouth
But in the hand, stretching out for the heart behind it
This cage of holy acceptance
The race to the bottom of that red place
Snake, that thing, that turns there
Settled under the chest because there is only war here
Violence on the coast
In the corridors
The country designing itself, vacant and threatening
Without need to measure the space between this word
And my last
The present grows smaller and smaller
As the future grows larger and larger
The Australian's book was written
Following an oath taken never to write
Again. Everything
Had too much importance,
Too little
I do not want to rest my fate on the ordinary,
On security - I want to talk to everyone!
But God is not a parent
Not a mother or a father
And you must also look beyond my voice
To hear my voice authentically
Even I, who did it, must search for evidence of what I did -
So tired that there is no occasion I will rise to
Nothing intimate in my movements towards the world
I cannot rest on my own hand
Beauty, even of clouds, alerts me
To the partiality of the flower
I have held the smallest man's hands
The strength still in them, of a giant
And
Raising my laugh to the level of a physical characteristic
Say: Don't be restless with others' love
For these organs, these unreliable means of detection
Are the very ones which find the major violations
Like that three-eyed fish running
In the river behind our homes
Spies
Six unknown named agents appeared to me with paper plots
Of the sea-floor
Asking, What did you see from the satellite?
That we have reduced truth down to steam?
On your side of the ocean a bargain was struck
To keep to the clock which kept old hours, to laugh
at beggars, to collect antiques and to spit
at stones
Startling and for the record I could only reply candidly
That if there is in fact no excuse
For not doing not what you can do
But rather the exact right thing
Then my life until now has been useless
And no amount of surveillance is likely to produce
The clean cut of a line or even the expected
Disobedience of the unavoidable self -
And just like a dream the spies floated away, telling nothing. . .
The Story Of Someone Who Knows Nothing
Betraying no journeys, what might be is visible from here
The colours as new as the ones you see all the time
I am horrified by the fact that I am not in a war
(and there are wars)
Do I want an epoch to happen
So that my poetry may have some place to suffer
And become golden?
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