Earth’s Prayer

Dear friends, this is how I would pray
You look upon me.
I had these thoughts while
You were building your temples
Upon my mantle.
A holy site, a holy structure,
God’s temple,
You cannot imagine the insult!
Are my oceans not deep enough
To house all of the gods for you?
Are my trees not numerous enough to serve
as fingers for all your ironic gods?
Does the wind not blow fierce enough
To serve as the echoing
Incantations of a mad howling
God who has her whole life served
You with all her passion and bounty?
How much did it cost to build your temples?
What is their upkeep?
You wash my valleys in your blood
In the name of an absent delinquent God
Who has done nothing for you
Which my rains and fields do not
Do freely all the world around.
You cannot argue about my
Existence or divine form.
I willingly bear your waste,
I’ve been reduced to a mere staging area.
I’ve been accused of housing your Hell,
You’ve made me synonymous with filth and sin
And terror beyond your ability to cope.
You have cursed my womb,
Spat upon my breast;
And yet I’ve made you fat,
I’ve loved you beyond the form of any God
Whose temples you plague me with.
I exist now only as the rotting corpse
Beneath your feet.
Keep your alms,
I want no arms in my name.
I swallow your churches because they are obscene.
I reclaim my stone and mortar,
And the wood of your crucifix.

-Patrick Conners Jr
10/30/11

The Cold Is A Terrible Thing To Forget

Reading Charles Simic tonight.
Bad chill set in a few hours ago.
Dogs bark in the late October night,
                Answering a train whistle
That reminds us the track
Is still there,
The same way a dog bite
Reminds us of nature,
And September reminds us of the world.
Glass is empty.
The cold is a terrible thing to forget.

-Patrick Conners Jr

Charles Simic Early Evening Algebra

early evening algebra
- Charles Simic

The madwoman went marking X’s
With a piece of school chalk
On the backs of unsuspecting
Hand-holding, homebound couples.

It was winter. It was dark already.
One could not see her face
Bundled up as she was and furtive.
She went as if wind-swept, as if crow-winged.

The chalk must have been given to her by a child.
One kept looking for him in the crowd,
Expecting him to be very pale, very serious,
With a chip of black slate in his pocket.

-Charles Simic

172

you've been writing all day

listless seeking poignant

pregnant with some art

an incoherent fury of

untranslatable muk

thoughts, sins, temptations

regrets, longings, ghosts

Always ghosts

Running to and diving from

History intersected with

the faultiness of remembrance

imbued with emotion

fretting for the perfect syllable

"Lar!" That is how I'll end

this line! That's it, that's perfect!

the feeling dissipates

your grounded

hollowed tired

you've dragged yourself

over mental agonies

the result is only migraine

and inattention

Frantic suitcase riddle

swarms of experience

highly distant

leading to a separating will

And ego-high

The perfect verse



　
patrick conners jr-

Take Back The Night

Tonight I'm thinking about captivity

And the stars

In the evening as the shadows grow

We flee inside

There are faces outside

We cannot go

Out

The night swallowed

Our freedom

How

Who

The drunken night is chaotic

Its absurd

Without lights where can we hide

Its absurd to be afraid of your own yard

In the vast expand outside in darkness

We can sing out like the stars

And eat of the moon

And we used to dance at night

-Patrick Conners Jr

John Berryman poem 172

Dream Song 172
By John Berryman

Your face broods from my table, Suicide.
Your force came on like a torrent toward the end
of agony and wrath.
You were christened in the beginning Sylvia Plath
and changed that name for Mrs Hughes and bred
and went on round the bend
till the oven seemed the proper place for you.
I brood upon your face, the geography of grief,
hooded, till I allow
again your resignation from us now
though the screams of orphaned children fix me anew.
Your torment here was brief,


long falls your exit all repeatingly,
a poor exemplum, one more suicide,
to stack upon the others
till stricken Henry with his sisters & brothers
suddenly gone pauses to wonder why he
alone breasts the wronging tide.

-John Berryman

With our naked souls in the air we begin our journey.

Here, the devil is just another soothe sayer, nothing to be feared.

We paint the sky as moving into our selves. We settle into our skin.

Langauges are made between two people as a contract of truth;

You have broken every line of it,

You and your infinite tales each more exotic than the last. They entrance us

We sit at your feet like Bhikkhus at the feet of a

Bronze Buddha. We draw you a warm bath of

Milk and rose petals and your ethearal body only floats

On top. I have found that this is not your sign of Christlike

Perfection. This is your unrelenting fear. It fills you like

breath filling an inflatable raft. You lay there suspended over

The warm white milk. The unknown holds us all captive. It

Determines our actions and speech but I have never seen

A case just like this. This inflated indesicive vessel

Over a clean pure tub. We choose our words carefully, our

Independence in this life depends on it. We choose a slow and

Reflective thought, building a water proof vault to stash our

Souls. So afraid that we may not be good at this floating. That we

May soil our soul by living.

Our words and your words. Words, words like charging bulls.

Patrick Conners Jr