Gossip: Both Sides of the Mouth

Gossip: Both Sides of the Mouth

For the Ones Who Claim Jesus But Scream “Barabbas! Give Us Barabbas!”

Planet earth like a teething ring suspended

Hangs by its world-chain.  Your pram waits in the corner.

Cows are let out.  They’re sluicing the milk-house floor.

                                                                                                Seamus Heaney

                                                                                                Bann Valley Eclogue

Tell me stories are borne another way and I’ll tell you

you never labored one day in your entire life.  Never

a shovel or a belching cow.  Never a bucket at your boot

filled with snow before you even make it to the barn.  Shit.

You’re only lips and tongue and a thin alley throat.  A street

corner at night to five a.m. whoring your lie for a pack

of smokes and a clumsy stroke.  A plucked game bird. 

A tabloid cryer.  A pew-stainer.  Gasoline in your gills

when good men walk out and past you and sigh at what

you might have been.  You hack and cry and light yourself

on fire you ride their coat-tails and when you arrive

you wrap yourself around them like a contamination vest.

You try to snuff them out.  You reach into their jeans

and squeeze.  Jesus you seem sweet, the way, before all this

you’d sneak peaks at the grocery store, at the man

and his wife and their happy life and you’d almost

shit yourself wanting it.  You’d swallow gobstoppers

and near to choke yourself to see him rescue you.  You go down

to the cold linoleum and open your shirt and spill your privacy

into the isle with you and let the tantrum you’ve given birth to

run wild pulling everything off the shelf, every can of soup

every bar of soap every block of cheese every banana ripped

out of its bunch every bottle of top shelf merlot and loaf

of bread and quart of milk the whole store’s strewn

with you.  Your loose untamable Satan.  How did you make it

this far?  Whose clothes hid your growing belly?  The story?

It’s back at the corner of the house.  While you, and in the blizzard

waiting, stake a claim on surveyed land, while you, unbooted

and barehanded open the door to make your path to the barn

the snow you never prepared for falls and falls and falls. 

It belongs to no one, even after landing.  Wind’s still gusting.

Goading you.  Up by the side of the barn the drift’s hitting the roof.

You break through the crust with the wrong socks on.  Fuck

if you know how to live a story.  You can’t even lift your foot half-way

into the yard.