I

Violence is an exotic prayer
Where performer and the performance blend
In dark that comedy called —
‘Of errors Committed and others Uncommitted’
That's all too human, to not be all too Divine
It cancels the other forgotten selves
(How different from me, all these!)
And those too who still await their play
To concentrate on the most remembered one
That is also the best forgotten

It knows that time must have a stop
And that it is better, better, better
To bid adieu in silent solitude
To prevent further collateral damage
While waiting ever still for life's eternal spring.

II

Violence is also love wasted
That couldn't find an adequate object
Into which your self could pour
And keep on doing that which kept on
Wanting to be done again again again

That is being extraordinary in an ordinary way
Because that is doing poetry like one loves
Another human being and is loved for being
In between lines of zero conditioning.

III

Violence is stealing those dreams
That God smiled upon in the beginning
Asking us to witness Him in His multiplying plenitude
Where there was always more than one needed
And there was encouragement, none excluded

But this was before there was authority to break up with
Then it was found that a gunshot was easier
Than ripping off pages that didn't understand
What all poetry was not, would never be.

IV

Violence, poetry is not
And yet when faced between life and death
It is cruel enough to ask for an offering
Of that beautifully bodiless soul
That isn't loveless and yet impossible to touch
Except as it exists in the immortality of poetry's promise.

V

This is a private contract signed by all
With all the dead that came before
And returned not to Heaven nor Hell
But must be found in these —
Earthly lines into which is carved
An ode, a lyric, an epic or an elegy.

Struggle struggle struggle
Ever more for the eternal spring of life
That shall rise out of this mortality
Having sucked death out of the old marrow
And replenish it with the new breathing
Of an ever-blooming day in May.