Lamentation

                                                            I.

Born up, below.

Dollar bills float in a stream of piss along the Ohio River

and I can’t imagine a Founding Father.

Systemic matrices bind the survival of so many, so many Whitmans,

but who can say Walt Whitman anymore?  Who dares?

This stripper on my lap

is the wife of the pimp in the back, lumps of semen outright.

Dark hours in the coal mines.  Rubbing together kindling to escape into fire.

And illusory flicks of headlights,

seen with 3-D glasses,

worth more than me,

aborting the youth, one youth at a time.

There is no corruption but me, in a holocaust I caused,

in a guilt where guilt is all, in a guilt where psychotic aims, indecisive

yet prove to know, grammar of the masses.

                                                            II.

No better than the cigarette that kills me, I never find the Jesus of Nazareth,

as the prayers fly above me, like fireflies, reaching

reaching the god of every soul’s surrender. 

But how to kneel on the bum on the park bench?

How to place my palms together, in the shit storm Lear sat in?

How to say aloud, let alone sing, praise or forgive or redeem,

when I will have to drag these bones to the dust?  And, worse, witness

the dyings of my parents, friends, partner—how can I beg

for a life worth living, as I can’t stand straight can’t

stand on feet, use utensils.

                                                            III.

I shoulda been an ancient humanoid

before Adam, way way before the half-life of bones,

way before Ice Ages,

way way back when the panacea was rock and teeth and trees and fruits,

and creeping and hunching and climbing,

and paranoid of giant creatures.

I shoulda walked when no Jesus or Hell or Heaven or God or Moses

or Civilization was HERE.

I shoulda been eaten by tears.