Ronnie Donn

 

William Tell
                 always keep a diamond in your mind, boy
                           -T. Waits

Light, that's me!  This is better than night sun blazing
Fixed in concrete, reminding me we all go down.
Ten years passed between hitting the nail once
And hitting it again.  Time became dermal at one point,
And everyone's face burned.  I have only one story
That, like Diderot, I'll tell you over and over:
Pick the plate up and drop it--that's a way to question
The waitress, because all the decent musical ghosts
Burned up years ago.  I am reminded, in the Luciferian

Sense of things, how fires can be never quenched
And how the worm manages to live.  They will die
With no help from us, that is.  With this in mind I tried
Fixing on a specific place and a specific name,
But all the people I knew very well died and floated off,
Faces slack as an unmade bed, figuring out the sun.
The word START blinking on a water tower on my way out
Of town--it was better than getting plenty of rest at dusk

And it seemed like going door to door was much better
Than sitting at home smiling and thinking about it.
You know: with a razor balanced between your teeth.


Lascaux Pit Reproduction

We know all the dead by their eyes.
They refuse a sensual description
And because of it I had to pass
Time.  First the carnal notch.  Then a fast
Strike at this heart-shaped row of four lines.
Then comes my thing with wall painting:
The killed bison, as in the original, gazing
Through a telescope of entrails into the face
Of its hunter--a man erect, dead.

This was a choiceless point in the day,
Listening to every speech, as though dead.
Considering the five-to-seven objects
On the table as epiphany and monument
To our human attention.
Then I stopped counting,
Smothered a few crickets
Huddled in the corner, made haiku.
I listened to a man having lunch with cancer
Of the inner ear.  He'd bought an eardrum
From his doctor.  I wondered with what
Decision to finish killing time--
London Conversion, Conversational Spanish,
Dissertate French, Cruel Arabic,
Even a little Japanese--but I knew
There aren't any dead languages
Except the ones calling you to believe that we,
Of all people, speak after death alone,
But I hear them rise up as only a true corpse can,
Like a man's waking push into his shirt.  So,

Consider the alcoholic who moves out of his house
To watch his house. Consider his use of binoculars
And his affinity with distance.
Think how that might be, shades drawn.  Lights
All off.  Moon dragging the white belly
Crushing the very chair you have sat in for years
When you sat in your chair alone, and grateful.
An entire house can appear in the eye now
Upside-down in a mist of neural firings,
Buckled through one notch in the brain, and Jimmy,
I had to ask, what exactly are you looking at?

Jimmy thought the coffee tasted like pickles.
Jimmy didn't say, but I waited, because it was clear
You'd ask a question in this place and get no answer
For weeks.  So I sat and braided a necklace, I'd got
Some dental floss, and counted my lucky stars.  Soon

I'd be wearing the bicuspid of the cook and giggling
In a bitter way at the life I was almost allowed to save
The time he'd try to stick his finger
In the wrong man's ass.  I saw it coming.  Then Jimmy
Flapped his hand in the air.  It came to rest on his head.
Jimmy was so bald, everybody hated him.
He looked scalped, like it'd all grown back but the hair,
Tighter, smooth like an Easter egg, allwhite, and I scared
He was about to tip it up and let the hot limbic thing
Inside spring out, reprimand, choke me to death
In a minute--but I could see the insinuations in his skull
Looking drawn on, seams without deviance too thin
To notice, and the very small pry bars of my history at work
To explode the dead treasure of his mind, and

I hated him.  The fat asshole nothing bad happened to,
Except getting caught just once.  So I told him
To tell me what his big fat ass had sat over
Two whole months, and his fingers drummed
To scare the answer up.  His fingers wagged
Like a giant slow tarantula boxing the air, palm just inches
From my own retracted lips, and the more he refused me
The more his heart grew precious and visible, perfectly hard
Beneath his arm, candyapple red, a grenade

I think maybe I was looking for proof, he relaxed.
Proof of what?  Proof that no matter what I did,
It would all just be there, with me or without me.
Of course I didn't know what that meant.
In my own mind, his head deployed itself in a crop of red
Skin-confetti, but then I hated Jimmy.  Maybe he meant
He looked for his own sentence, something like that,
World-sick and tired of the careless familiar way
It withholds punishment, something more than losing
All your teeth in an accident with a can of falling paint.
In this particular place where you have to apologize
In advance, for all what you do, where you cannot be
Punished and you cannot kill at will, and it turns you
Into a thief that steals and begs to get caught.

But then Jimmy was crazy.  And it was a great comfort
To get home, away from the soft socket of his mouth,
To lay down and trace the figure of the man
On his back, immobile and dead but erect and running
Through the air, in his sleep--

Or the humpbacked animal tilted on its groin
On the barbed line running through to the exit
Through an open hole, followed by circle
On circle of blood, which is a way of mentioning
All the planets in a blood-eclipse,
I saw from where I was with hands cuffed
Behind my head with one leg of fire
And one leg of ice.  The dropped animal
Lifting away from the hunter and turning its head
To see a man dead without a mark.  But
I did not wander in the middle of this.
I did not wonder about it.  I just stared at the elastic
Tumbling thing I'd made and remade.
I didn't even have to open my eyes.
Not at all.  Not even to sleep.

Allegorically Speaking, That Is/Troubled Place

I did it because there was nothing else to do.
Besides, I'd seen it in the prison movies.

Everybody had already taken off their hats
To the exploding summer hostas.  The whole place
Had assumed some Luciferian arrogance.

Even the escapees stood on the other side
Of a high-voltage fence and its acrobatic razor
Wire, shaking their black and yellow heads,
Burning their uniforms and roasting beans,
Spitting at the fence to scare us with the noise
Of electrocuted saliva.

They'd snort and hawk, and we'd tremble
Then throw down our hoes and bury our heads in anthills.
In their spare time,
Which they now had a whole lot of,
They pointed at the ring of colored islands
That guarded our troubled place, its points on the horizon
Spinning like protein deposits on a UFO

So I decided to remedy this strange arrogance
Stemming I knew from a lack of an education.
I started a class for a study of the Masters,
Starting with Hawthorne, who was in a sense God. . .

I stood tall and vascular on the chair
I taught with a fist peeping in solar flares
How many nails and with what joy Martin Luther
Nailed his civil rights protest to the church-stallion.
It took a lot of nails and a lot of coaxing,

One for every day of the year.  This eventually led
To the Declaration of Despondency dear to 1789
Written in silk on throaty onions.  To make damn sure
They understood, I showed them an original Xerox
With the pictures in the margins and all, and continued
To explain about Malcolm X and the Pink Panthers

And the White House Seizure, and the filibustering properties
Of public flu vaccination.  And how when Hawthorne went all the way
from Massachusetts, New England, to Idaho, just to meet the devil
At the tracks and ask him how to get back home, he walked!
But that was nothing compared to the time when Hawthorne

Met Bill Knott, the great innovator and Allegorist, and then
Broke his hand punching Knott in the jaw
For exchanging the ingredients to the Printing Press
With Pre-Raphaelite soldiers.  Naturally the Pre-Raphaelites

Were Loyalist and kept hand-copied versions of Luther's protest
On hand at all times.  They tucked them away under their subglotti,
And that's why Pre-Raphaelites never talk, but sign with their hands
Now (especially the deaf).  I told the great story of how

Luther's petition angers the Philosophers and Dentists alike,
Who would stop at nothing to pamper the lavoratory
And thus keep the paper industry from sighing.  This eventually

Led to the Civil War, which is an oxymoron, a big
Stupid guy!  The conclusion of which was the perfection of paper.
And then I loudly remind my friends outside the electric fence
Of the time the our little class of prisoners all went to visit

Hawthorne's shrine in Paris in 1865, and ate
Sandwiches.  Wasn't that a good time?  You happy?
C'mon.  Man, that Hawthorne, I say with a smug glimpse
over my shoulder at the spitting, dirty escapees,
he had the most beautiful shirts.

 

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