ESP.LITERATURE

As who has come, returns.

The false prophets continue; tears flow, chin drips salty tears down back of sackcloth shirt.

An old man, unremarkable, off to the john on the hill, woken by bells, looking for surcease from the echoes of a mind fallen into desuetude. A hand tousles greyed shock of hair, straining the skeins through arthritic fingers, scratching at his scalp, a quick glimpse of the weary old coyote rump fleeing across the road, or chasing, flight or fight, that old saw, his gait offkilter, the ideas that come and go half understood, teasing and taunting, more work now for the little grey cells than once upon a time, opening the door of the outhouse, careless of creatures in the dark recesses, to hell with it, sitting with a sigh, the blue waters of the gulf tantalizing, metaphoric, a statement plain and simple full of meaning and profound significance. Write that, he thinks. Write that. But where to find the words? Conundrums. Mimic Papa and be hooted off the stage, rotten vegetables from the groundlings, coarse epithets, no sea not contained in merely a word, no word worthy of the task, depth beyond comprehension, depth to shore up the salty interface, sea and sudden sky, wind, pressing down, roiling the tides ebb and flow, gravity’s myth, the ancient fear welling up as I circle the rock from shallows to deep, the palpable pull from below, imaginary, frightening, the words conjoined, literature it becomes with the connotative deeps, its awakenings tousling the surface, white dunce caps on us poor Homo sapiens, the profound dim vacuity of consciousness where only stray beams of just words might probe, jacklighting images of who or what or why, so rarely why, or where then, or when, and that homonym emerging, tongue twisting, she sells seashells, seeing never believing, with the sea beyond, so tangible, but elusive, then the sudden bark, the yip of coyotes, receding through the desert scrub. From hind pocket pulling out the little yellow tablet, stub of pencil, writes: Literature is a mangy cur who besets one day and night, beguiling, becoming a fixture of the neighborhood, and as literature is read and reread so it becomes the impedimenta in one’s mind, tumbling about, echoing, and reechoing, provoking, enlightening, burdening, the metaphors mixed and bleeding into distant cries and calls of predator and prey.

APPARITIONS
Apparitions
	haze
	old men stubbing toes on stones
	cuffs rolled, bellies round
	incensed women burning books;
	faggots, a spindly leg

just words
all I write are lies
words, just words
all I say are lies
just words
all I think are ...

	I had a girl in summertime
	in fall I let her go;
	a laugh, a lie, daft rumors of spring
	beneath the guiling snow.

just lies
shadows or shades, or fantasy
eidolon, duppy, doppelganger wraith
words
all ...

well, do they ever say just what they mean?

February 2025