Michael P. Workman

If, By Your Own, Then



Or I am a poem without a person,
Or I am un poisson,
Or I am The Mothman,
Or I am the light of a hidden arc,
Or I am a causeway,
Or a bauhau
Or a lemon tick beagle with jubilant movements like a mote of simple
dust in
the eyeliner of a Virgin with a steel sombrero and day-glo pantynose
Or I am Father of Thee, oh strange sons, oh beard and Shams, oh leaden
weight protect me from Pluto,
This the ungulate wrought of iron specks cast by Promethian odes and
tempered with the tonguelettes of Nubian gorge and Sphinxing
Isis by some somber curve of desert dune like the breasts of Spring and
Apples

APPLES! Have you seen the apple? Or the oubliette? Either are our lost
or
hidden advance-way.
Apples! Apples by the cistern that some man or woman grew from the
hillside
by white pine trees when I was a dizzy dancing boy!
Apples and the delicious adventure of chaos, apples and Erisian
splendour,
Apples and the cascaded shadow of Seneca and the lonely wing of
Pocahontas,
Apples and the basketball that resembles an APPLE AN APPLE
AN APPLE that befell old King Newton in his sleepdream reverential
torrent
apples and the math that HINTS  merely or parallels the truth which
systems
must shake off of themselves, of themselves, if these truths are
self-referential it is because you have not TASTED THESE APPLES
it is because the poem of truth is a stream,
and a stream is divine eternal advancing and until you JUMP
oh until you SWIM
until you by your OWN grace
by your  OWN  sanity
by your OWN  compassion
by your OWN equanimity
by your OWN    Walt  Whitman
by your OWN Kerouac
BY your Own  Christ and Diogenes,
Nietzsche, King, Comrade, Buddha, Lennon,
by your OWN sweet bootstraps gravitate into this fathomless, golden and
unending creek
if by your own fall into,
or jump,
or simply pass perspiring by on a hot summer's night,
and screaming like a falling star into our Cosmos, require some cool
impossible
dip,
by your own you must learn then to swim.

Dorothy Mienko Barry Seiler Lisa Gordon Stephen Mead Michael P. Workman T. Lewis Olga Lalić-Krowicka Joel Fry Dave Ruslander Anna Kaye Forsyth Keith Nunes