contents

John Landry

Variations on the Balancing Ball Act
or Death by One Opiate or Another

(on Waco)

"I object to being killed in wartime" Jacques Vache


1.   seven seals sun themselves at low tide
     contentedly agitated
     by the cry of one lone loon

2.   Military Industrial Complex be damned
     no phoenix rises from this Fire Dance
     hovers maybe a paper bird
     a thin black ash like Maui snow
     that sweet gone cane wing
     a small child's kite cut loose
     and sucked up toward the sun

3.   anything which is inhuman
     I do not care for
     Reno is dizzied with gambling
     Reno is Nero sidewise fiddling with the tactics of men
     no revolution in letting burn the compound fracture
     of the everywhere cyclomyopian screen
     through which all I's are mesmered

4.   under the unsealed sun
     boredom is one thing not necessary to suffer
     yet the fool, my dancecard is filled
     with patience, mercy, compassion---
     the invisible chorus of all my other selves

5.   come, panacea for a day or 2
     if we keep up this way
     inebriated by power
     we'll be unable to detect
     when the rapture comes--
     hell, either it's a daily rapture
     or it's nuthin', Baby.

6.   Vache whispers through my laparoscopic wounds
     "Nothing will kill a man for you
     like being obliged to represent a country."
     song ricochets from breast bone to pelvis
     through new secret chambers
     singing for the gone felosdese

7.   fling that organized hairshirt into the night
     pry your operculum open
     doomed are those around the ones
     who believe it is impractical to dream

GLOSSOLALIA 7: Copyright © 1996 J. Lehmus. All individual works Copyright © 1996 by their respective authors. All further rights to works belong to the authors and revert to the authors on publication.