Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

sky burial 1/11


tassels hang like acrid notes
filling my nostrils
and I am lazy with conviction
senses left to rot, my
vulture nature is clumsy with hunger
trailing lost sheep
it's easy to point the finger
and say the sky is falling,
baa....baa.....

in Budapest my genes
are afixed church spires
on Erzsébet utca
and my grandfather is buried
with his Roman collar; could the
noose be far behind?

I am weary of life in the darkness
with nothing but my poet's hands to
sustain me, the streets are narrow
and the North wind blows across
Lake Erie, I am terribly
human and not at all distinguished
from my own self-replication and
repulsion, I no longer engage in
revisionist history

(where did I go wrong when all I
wanted was life and life betrayed
me with truth and truth is much
less than a fickle lover?)

memories dance with images
in my melancholy
you are sleeping and the world is
a siren no one hears

in Tibet the body is cut up and
fed to vultures,
nothing is wasted,
I don't know where the monkey mind
goes.

the fourth stanza says it all.......the poem is a neat reflection on a life from it's ideal expectations to the reality of how it all turns out.....we may think we are making all the choices, but in the end we were merely blown by the wind.....

Great piece...here is my reply...
North Erie
Long point childhood bay
Hooked the big one
Now my father's ashes
In Algonquin black water
My sister not far
The small village
Tobacco farms
My teenage back
Bent over tar soaked leaves
From Austrian
Empire
Slavic languages
Soak my Grandmothers tongue
Perogies
Cabbage Rolls
Tripe Soup
Rye bread and whisky too
All from an old church
Ukrainian wheat field
Lvov
I don't speak the language

You write with depth and conviction.