THESE BLANK-EYED ZEALOTS W/ WORDS LIKE RANCID MILK SPILLING FROM THEIR DISEASED MOUTHS

So, this one was published in a paper journal in the fall of 2019, or so I'm told.  I was sent an email request for my address, which I replied to, but no copies of the journal ever showed up.  Of course, the zine has a website, too (minimal content, lots of tangential info), and they list all of their past contributors there.  I decided to check it out on a whim earlier this week when I was trying to update my publications and rejections lists, and there I was, between Steele and Terry.

So, in any event, this is the poem.  I assume it's the one that would have brought me fame and fortune had it been seen by the scouts at American Poetry Idol, but such is life...….








on the first morning of his life as a mortal



here in this house where the
priests bless ghosts


here on these stairs
where knives are offered freely
by the sick and the blind


he walks these halls w/out purpose


he considers where his beliefs,
where his lack of beliefs,
have led him


his childhood of television antennas
and of negative space,
of cut-out shapes where his
father should have been, and the
man wasn’t dead, no, just
absent


was just elsewhere


and the knives are taken eagerly
by eight year-old boys,
and they scream happy threats at one another


they turn to their younger brothers,
to their older sisters, and shout
YOU’RE DEAD!
and then run away to hide, and so
what do you do about the ones
who are never found?


and this is his problem w/ faith,
you see,
these sons and daughters so
viciously murdered, so easily taken away,
and these blank-eyed zealots w/ words
like rancid milk falling from their
diseased mouths, and what they
speak of is a better place
  

what they overlook is that the
atrocity itself is the most important
                                               thing


is the here and now, and that
anything else is only death


and he considers his own boys, at their
mother’s but due back in an hour,
and he steps out the back door, limps
across the yard w/ his one good ankle,
                         w/ his one bad one,
and stares up into the flawless sky


rain on the way,
but not until later this evening


an entire august afternoon to
spend at the lake


simple joy, which is all he would
ask for the people he loves