Alan Catlin- Three Poems

              The End

                   

I should have been receiving food stamps

from Mars that's what she had written

on her:"Let's fly to the moon" itinerary

that included places in the Bronx no white

woman would dare to go:"The Bronx Zoo

holds animals that don't exist.  Seeing them

makes you  go blind.  You are allowing

your children to become agents of an

infernal being. This conversation is being

monitored by an unfriendly God."

She said things like that with a straight face

as we looked at African Beasts she claimed

came from two thousand years ago:

"They were reptiles when I took you

to the Natural History Museum. We could

go back there and learn about the past.

They flew beings that had no wings then,

they still do but no one will admit it."

They sure as hell flew things through her mind.

I woke up in a strange dream of New York City

in which there were street things neither man

nor beast would  admit to  knowing crawling

on my skin,  she would say, "I had acquired

a disease in the Bronx."

"What kind of a disease?" I would ask,

" A New York disease, New York is a

special place.   The God we recognize as divine,

died here.  I have proof. The Bible tells us

there is another  finer world.  Our skin diseases

no longer  exist there." She was singing another

life story  through my lips and all I could  

feel was the end,  a strange place that would

look like a Subway  Station in Upper Manhattan

but would be somewhere else that felt

like Manhattan in another life.

 

The Woman Who Came from Nowhere

They only poems she believed in

came from a white giant’s thigh,

trailed sea weeds like the green

hair of drowned women, mirror

images of the self anyone could

witness as she did, though glass

bottomed boats scratched and marred

by coral wreathes that held the scriptures

she read the holy words from, reciting

them in cadence the way nuns did

in cloisters at the end of a diseased

mind.  All the stories she wrote down

bore that taints of dried blood, self-

inflicted wounds sealed by an open flame

from hearth fires in a strange, afflicted

place she referred to as “where she was born.”

Annotated maps showed portals, called

stops, describing  the way from one place

of an evolving plain of existence she

traveled on, the links of which were

a colored lined grid for easy reading

underground where the artificial light

she read with was muted like the trumpets

of the fallen-from-grace-angels she

claimed were her consorts though no one

could see who she meant.

Where she was now could be described

as, lost in transition, or so she would say

when asked to explain what she scribbled

in between lines of the large print books

in a dead language of her own invention;

said it was a place like nowhere,

only closer to home.

Alien Thoughts

They say the body I came with

doesn't fit me anymore.

How can that be?

Nothing has changed since the hour

of my birth-19-it says on

the calendar of my life.

The big hand and the little hand

are pointing toward the place

of no return just over the sunset

where the darkest places are.

When I arrive, someone will

teach me how to smoke and

all ten of my fingers will be

blessed with fire.

The voice inside my throat

will be happy then and will

stop eating both the house and

the home we have been living in.

Maybe then my body will remember

who I am and come back to me

so we can get together and be

who we really are together,

not this person wearing these

clothes, pretending to be me

in the mirror,

behind the safety glass

where all the real secrets

are stored.