Saturday, February 7, 2015

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.

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