Some of my favorite posts to Litkicksdotcom

[zero_hero]

I been looking for this one for years, I could not find it on the Internet Archive but I found it on my hard drive. I am so glad I saved it.

Eating Ghosts

Posted to board: Poetry
by headburner on Apr 22, 2004 5:45 PM

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“The spiritual dangers
I have enumerated
Are not the only ones
Which beset the savage”

Behold this shadow of reflection to the soul,
To events vital and part of myself,
And as such a necessarily source of danger.

“If it [was] detached from him entirely
(as he believes that it may be) he would die.”

There are magicians in water and stones,
Who can make a man ill
By stabbing his silhouette with with a word.
Trample upon, struck, stabb,

Feel the injury, as if it done to your person,
As a man’s darkness falls on one of these stones,
Or a ghost that draws his soul out from him.

Therefore,
This house guards a messenger
Sent absent of owner.

A man calls out the name of the sender,
The watchful ghost in the stone,
That came with evil to the funeral.

The coffin retreats to another room.

Most bystanders,
With the exception of the nearest kin,
Retire a few steps beyond a person’s health.

The spectators recoil,
The assistants stand,
On the side of the grave,
The grave-diggers
And coffin-bearers
Attach ropes,
As shadows,
Tightly, firmly,
To persons round their waists.

Maggots are a degree of quandary.

Small snails
Frequent the neighbourhood
Of limestone beasts.
They grow lean
And die from loss of blood.

Ancients in Ararat
Trod as if hyaenas
On a man’s shade.

Deprived of the power of speech and motion,
A dog stands on a roof in the moonlight,
Dragged with a rope.

Caution, a woman’s shadow
Will make her mother-in-law
Fall on her legs.
Thin, stupid and lazy.

Snake hands contemplate
Eve lay asleep under a tree.

The awe and dread,
With which familiar facts
Become anthropology,

(Or if a man’s shadow
happens to fall
on his mother-in-law),
Is ground for divorce.

In that case,
He will have to leave his wife,
And return to God.

“Sir, if I am not telling the truth,
I hope I may shake hands with my mother-in-law.”

[mnaz]

whoa.

dig the

Ancients in Ararat
Trod as if hyaenas
On a man's shade.