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UNDERGROUND VOICES: POETRY
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MP POWERS
428 Greene Street, Key West Before Capote got rolled here for playing grab-ass with the sailors, before Hemingway tore out the urinal and dragged it to his house of cats, this bar was a bordello, an icehouse, and a morgue. And before that a hanging tree grew - it still looms ugly and twisted in the center of the bar, and though dead men do not hang from its boughs anymore it seems to bear their sorrows and breeds some mournful muse. Are the ceiling fans old swastikas circulating occult burlesques in frames? The brassieres droop over the gantry like stalactites in a cave, each one bathed in dust and neon dread intoxication. And the ex-con beside me with eyes of a dung beetle - he must've been recycled by eternity. He plays the role of Puppet Monarch, his mark of Cain being a small purple scepter branded sidelong on his brow. And when I tell him my girlfriend just broke up with me, there's truth in his reply: "You don't lose your girlfriend on this island," he says, "you just lose your turn." Pan Humanity I do not dread humanity, I dread Pan, goat-hooved half-man - that mythic god and shepherd I see in everyone. I see him in pilots plumbers Pentecostals. I see him in murderers bunglers buglers playing taps cheeks puffed slender fingers sullen agents in the song of death. And in the soft glutton and in the swollen mob I equally see him. He is the terrifyingly absurd He is the primal caterwaul underlying everyone and in every riotous (big little) victory he reigns. He rules the courtroom coliseum and boudoir reigns in politics (writes its histories) this indestructible - And I see him I keep seeing his blossoming image fading in time. He is nature personified. He is nature's keenest promulgator of the lie. M.P. Powers has been published in Nerve Cowboy, Identity Theory, Poems Niederngasse, Ascent Aspirations, and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. |
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© 2007 Underground Voices |
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