at allantide

i.

I can’t keep doing this I say

Getting up to write this poem and over  half hour later,

after it stopped and started and wouldn’t come on and had to be

reloaded and now I’m finally typing these first words.

It is the first of November, the day of saints after the true night

of spirits, and in the mind of a one time catholic this is the hollow space,

the glass bubble between All Hallows Eve and the Day for dead ones,

and I look at this faithless fool and shake my head and say,

I can’t keep doing this, no I can’ keep doing this,

and when I sip the coffee I know you’re not the only thing that

needs to be put away.

The beginning off things never holds an answer,

and then old men stood on temples and old women sat in front

of smoke, shooting prophecies,

these are only upside down memories,

there is no answer in the beginning, in this half startled waking,

and sunlight on the first real day.

We needed this day to recover ourselves.

We needed today so that tomorrow we can begin to be ourselves.

Right now we are still settled down from being someone else,

 it is too cold to go to the island, too cold to know if it has

disappeared.

This morning is the time of cigarettes and coffee and sunlight

and the royalty of the bathroom,

This is he morning of the new language, and not the old nostalgia,

and not writing of all the things we’ve written a thousand times before.

There was a time when you had to say everything.

Now you only have to say enough.

And now all saints day is upon us, an unorgasmic o, a virgin bubble between

all hallows eve and all souls, reserved for people pure in their sterility,

saints in their hostility who could not love life, give me the red of the leaf

rather than the gold of heaven, make all these days the fine time of souls.