More poetry (or prose)

Hi Jim,

Here's a more modern one that I happen to know has won a number of poetry
slams in a number of places over the past ten years. When it is read aloud by
the author, it is read quickly, speeding up frantically as it goes, almost in a
long, single breath, until the last three words. Those come slowly.

But this is how it originally appeared on the page:

"'Eat me.'  He was begging now; and she wondered if she could, if she could
ingest him, swallow him whole so that he would never again have to look outside
of her, outside into the world he wanted only to be entombed out of, to be
protected from as if he were once again living off of her insides, off of the
meals she took and the sleep she found between moments of panic and passion and
of course off of her strength, the strength that announced itself in her
silence her shyness and the powerful way she directed her eyes downward and away as
if she knew that she did not have to look because her panic could not be seen
by anyone who wasn't in her who did not live encased, floating, free from the
horror that the knock might come or that the ringing might burst out into a
tolling of a final bell and that it would have to be answered that payments
would have to be made and that there would never be a chance to vanish again,
that once it was gone, once the moment of ingestion as a possibility had passed
that he would be always on the outside remaining forever in the world that he
knew was a lie from one other moment long before when another face another
mouth awaited him and he did not want to vanish then or to be kept free from what
had made him now so tired so unable even to breathe without pain that he knew
the only place he could find the past was curled deep inside her his head
touching his knees as he hid from the light and the darkness and listened only to
the one rhythm that mattered the one steady beat that promised silence and
peace and a future without pain even if it came also without feeling without
ecstasy without that trembling delight of terror that had once drawn him like a
magnet towards wherever he did not think he should be because he did not need to
go there anymore because he knew now that the only life that could be was the
life swallowed and stored forever in rest in quiet and in the certainty that
she would always carry him comforting him even by breathing in air and by
pumping her blood and it was all the assurance anyone could need and it was
offered to him as an exit until the reality of the offer, its honesty and
frightening sincerity finally struck him and of course by then she was gone."

--John

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Received on Tue Jul 1 00:18:41 2003