CONFESSION ZERO (The Weaver's Song)

He has taken off his sandals.
His feet seem new as he moves about.
The sandals have been on for far too long.
Walking in them seems pointless.

Within one hundred yards a crowd has begun to grow
from the moans of protest because something lives there.
Something breathes the jarring dust of solitude
and cries out without a throat, tongue lashed to pretense
with all the trappings of hostilities’ offspring.

O! He wishes to see the sun!
Alone, unshackled, while wearing his own sandals,
his own clothes, his own wish, his own sky!

How long now has it been?
Years… years alone. Loneliness is just a word,
like worship or friendship or death.
This man has a crowd of words, a horde of thoughts
that are his, yet heavy with chains like some rabid beast.
His voice now an echo unto himself. Unto himself.

He has concluded his begging for freedom and is now
ready to move along. He had things he wanted to give away.
He had things he wanted to relinquish like rolling thunder.
But they did not care to hear his storm.
They said he would not enter the world
until he swallowed more fouled water,
sunk into misery with the others;
he could taste them in the water,
see their amused and pale faces.

Outside of his agony a crowd has begun to grow
From the cries of dissent because something grows there.
Something grows with each day, each squeeze of the chains.
Something wordless and ugly breeds with the pain and terror,
has begun to grapple with creation.

Plans now swagger across his floor like a five-star general
on the battlefield of his god-fouled glory.
His fresh ideas barbed by his suffering,
lashed of his torture, his emptying eyes,
agony-worn limbs and stolen days,

brethren calling to him with grave retribution,
where his own spirit scans the stone horizon
with a victim’s lens; an innocent man’s visionary
of truth and justice
brought forth for oily hunger; terrified toadies
with their own profit to inhabit.

We stand out in the cold for the fog of life to paint our silver breath on the thickened air, we cock our heads to watch it drift away, vanish really, to assure us that we’re living.

We clasp our beating wrist with our fingers to hear life’s deep thrum holding rhythm, while the things of art and sky whirl and our hearts complete what our tongues cannot speak.

We make no murmur as we enter into nightfall and have no pang as the birds return the sun, this is the world and we sway with her. O! Lean down with your tears of morning for our delight

And when the lords of death thrust their blades, hold us near, and steady our lance that they might feel our resistance in the red corridors of dream! Keep the lords of death at bay until our child is ready!

We stand out in the cold for the fog of life to paint our silver breath on thickened air, we cock our heads to watch it drift away, vanish really, to assure us of our living.

We are tired of these charlatans of supervision with their slabbing talk of doom-saying rubbish, toddling of this world and meandering through, stinking up the halls of power with fraud!

We scour our bodies for unfamiliar things to stay ahead of the drum, to glimpse more time in the drift, the granted breath, the banishment of the fading conclusion.

We imagine our lives must be most prized, even to the lords of death, who spend their time madly honing the edge of their chosen blade; the clock ticks their name, but still they whet,

they file the blade to turn upon themselves with, I suppose, an absurd glint of approval, while the things of art and sky whirl and their death completes what devious tongues could not.

And when these lords of death thrust their blades hold us near, and steady our lance that they might feel our resistance in the red corridors of dream! Keep the lords of death at bay until our child is ready!

Of their time, the goal was set by cruel decree, strident air inside the darkness, makeshift home, the winter birds in their towering cage, peering out at all the swagger of green,
ground level feeding under neon strobe where filled yellow taxis and fancy blue suits jingle turnstile iciness against the ancient use of this globe.

This is where children dream, dirt and cardboard cushioning their hunger with cold and fierce eyes, holding them close, kissing their thinning red lips, and the concrete humming low, echoing, hungry beasts marching toward their grief like a serenade of giants rising out of the fiery ash; Brontes, Steropes and Arges reaching up in fury with brightness, thunder, and lightning.

They rise not for the hordes of sleep-tattered children, they rise for the noise made of coldness, their heated hands wrapped in lava with the reaping of the unkind upon their breath. They’ll seek the cultivators of gloom, the progenitors of war and the ravenous well-to-do so there might be relief for the misery-born folds sleeping near death’s ragged claws. Soon the beasts of winter will clap their fury from end to end of the piercing streets with only the names of greed upon their lips.

StandUp For Kids

Official: Obama rejects Afghan options
When clarity hoisted its unruffled head, persuading tolerance and harmony, it asked but one simple question, what is all this hurry for digging graves?

Get ready, America: Here comes Sarah Palin
For the same reason we do not pick the green fruit from the tree, we must not, no matter how moved, select the greenest of ourselves to lead, and when faced with rotten fruit, we must be quick in discarding it altogether.

American Adviser to Kurds Stands to Reap Oil Profits
Now that they are able to see it, the people, waiting, grinding their teeth, their trust frail, a miserable pledge they’d heard before, a ruse, cuddles up next to an ashen liberty.

Host Lou Dobbs To Leave CNN
In the room with the talking box, where we gather to be awash in consumption, a tiny flicker adheres to our wonder.

Women Can’t be Trusted to Make Their Own Healthcare Decisions
They show them the tools of liberty, guns, tanks, planes, bombs, rockets, chairs, boards, shock, awe, death. They tell them these are the only weapons of freedom. They instruct them on their use and aim, inform them that trust… is a terrorist.

Service honors fallen at Fort Hood
Within all that is observed and undetectable, a memorial service, somber, a knot in the quaking cosmos. The boots and helmets and guns at attention. They stand ever still staring like creation, the devout sermons trailing them, leak a thimble of truth.

Deadly blast hits Pakistani town
This day’s count as it leaps, higher still, and where death rushes in, a blinding illumination crests within the winter of those still living.

States Mold School Policies to Win Federal Money
This is backwards! A wingless bird. A toothless shark. A blind guide. A spoken secret. A vivid shadow in the well lit dark.

Vatican Scientists Seek Evidence Of Alien Life
Galileo challenged them once, but this isn’t confrontation, this is the waste of spirit in a sky of seeking gods.

Big Bankers Say They're Doing God's Work ... Are They Right?
This would be the stuff of fairy tales, if not for its being bankrupt of justice; the wolf, after all, tried to convince the sheep that he was God.

The first box that arrived felt measured in stirring its love, took its time and danced a slow, involuntary drudge.

The second box swooped in- full tilt, red, white and blue, its gruesome melody taunting me in a complicit rue.

The third box that came home, yellow pine aroma aloft, pinched the air, stench of a war movie I’d watched.

The fourth box that reared its death to the terminal skies marched with a cadence, lockstep primordial demise.

The fifth and sixth and the three thousandth box to come suffered horror, hundreds of millions of gutless tongues.

Hasan tied to mosque of 9/11 hijackers
These things scatter like shards of steel carried in the air, gaping jaws, flags, winged by the soaring flesh of gravity, memories leap up, piercing the hue of skin.

More troops needed for Afghanistan: U.S. General Casey
And while they’re airborne in that nameless sky, because only vengeance can offer them comfort while torture moves in chorus with their stillness, they shall go in any direction the sightless point.

For Opponents of Abortion, a Victory in Health Care Vote
Foul captivity swells within these rich designs as their victory aborts the revered manuscript and their dream unveils our snatched decline.

UK honors fallen as Afghan death toll rises
The song’s been bellowing for much too long on behalf of death and the pale memory of death, so what song shall we sing for the victims?

Deadly shootings at US army base
Ugly images on a cracking barricade- duty and honor, murder and rage woven together like distressed beasts on their way to some future slaughter.

Fort Hood suspect alive, in custody
All else is done and of no use. Something moved the barrel nearer; the commandment of executioners, killers of terror molded into a human face.

Massacre Leaves 12 Dead At Fort Hood
The train didn’t slow down enough to stop, it rammed straight through the station like fear was running late for target practice. There’ll be plenty of time for that after the dust settles.

Suspect Was ‘Mortified’ About Deployment to War
Consumption was nearing its march, it sensed the bones in the arid desert, the frailty of spirits deep in its bowels- O the bitter breath of cowardice seeps from us all in this!

Gunman kills 12 at Fort Hood Army base, suspect alive
Then stretch his limbs taut with your foul machine, pull his stomach out and pour water into his heart. Forthwith! We’ve things to glean from such misery!

Suspected gunman hospitalized after bloody Fort Hood rampage
Are we not sufficiently trained, the best fighting force known to man? O what lesson is there to learn from this that war hasn’t already given us?



© 2009 by mark prime

We know that grief isn't empty.
We know it is sated with the things
that we wish weren’t part of our flesh;
this moving vessel that floats so close to us,
so near this; our living, that, as it passes,
we unload our apprehended breath
and dance… until it comes `round again.

When my friend told me of her daughter’s passing,
I was sick for days, and I imagined, if this news
pushed through me like infection, what gait it must
have granted those that loved her; the eternal flood
of sorrow in this still twisting unreachable,
the ferociousness of unrequited anger…

The boat will come round again.
But the shoreline will be bare of sweet Sondi,
save for the light glancing off the water.

We know that grief isn’t empty.
We know it spills over into our lives
with vigorous abandon leaving untold pain.
It has teeth and arms and legs and lips and hands,
and it waits upon no one, yet we wait upon its course like
a winter storm, laughter and joy, unbridled as it falls.

Yes. The shoreline will be bare of sweet Sondi
as our heartache ebbs with the fouled tide
and damp eyes search the night sky, yet
something’s changed; when the vessel comes round again,
we’ll be listening, faithfully waiting to heed her beautiful
laughter... floating in the air like a crescent moon.

Snowcap vanishing from Mount Kilimanjaro
The climber met her beloved, the African crown. She noticed his sagging face and howled her water.

'Twin Towers' warship in New York
It is the fall we most remember, the dead and the living toppling as one.

Bomb blast in Pakistan's Rawalpindi kills 35
Horrible explosions, more and more; the weight of our anger falling like icy talons upon our worship.

Clinton Denies Easing Pressure on Israel
We hear this with the attention of a murderous scream at the World Series, and we hear what we see, but not what we hear and we grasp the sport from the full on roar of two sides, one victor.

Contaminated Beef Recalled After Deaths
Not that the dead will remember our disgust or contemplate before ingesting or recall any of it with urgency.

The GOP has created a monster
The Party of Frankenstein created doubt- I suppose disbelief itself could be seen as monstrous…