Issue 14, December 1997
Perry Sams - Four Poems

"I would lie to you
If I could."


I would tell you
America is
as beautiful
as that song.
I would tell you
about the bridges
stretching across
the Mississippi
the Hudson
the Colorado
a few miles
outside Las Vegas.
I would tell you
only of beauty queens
not beauty gone to seed.
I would mention Mount Rushmore
not Russell Means or Leonard Peltier.
I would laugh like a wild horse
steaming up a Nevada dawn
and not say how laughter
gets canned and sold.
I will tell you how Bob Dole
has the best health care
in the world, but also how
a woman with a shopping cart
holding her treasures
has ulcers swallowing
her bare feet,
and just so you know I'm lying;  

after dark
she sleeps
with her eyes open
like a sunflower
standing outside your window.

She was among my favorite people
around Phoenix,
One of us who never quite fit in the
unreal world,
Because we like imagining a better world
of the future,
Because showing her insides became
as important
As that awful thick skin we're all advised
to develop,
to survive.

We may never know why she did it,
we can't know,
but I think eternity is in love with her
too, too much
to care about reasons which don't
add up
anyway in the light of day, but she
had her reasons
and love goes on trying to connect
us all tighter
in knots so light we can unravel them
with a word.

I just don't know anything anymore.

Marilyn was dead or dying
at this point, already
right up there on the screen
and the vicarious thrill
or itch around the spine
of seeing that,
Man, 
so fans picked up on Trane
instead and he couldn't
go anywhere while he was
truly himself without someone
having to touch his coat
or finger his cheek
or kiss him and breath in
all the jazzbreath they could
get to mingle
with their own loneliness 
Man, and somewhere in
bars lit only by candles
and the sound of the new savior
of music up on the--
wooden stage
there was a feast,
of lung and brain,
of tendons and eyebrows
and Trane getting thinner
and thinner until, like
Ralph Ellison sez,
Man, he
became invisible but not
in the same exact way--
                  It was almost funny
                           the fans doubled over
                  when they dragged him to the toilets
                           and chewed on bones,
                 and some fanatic saved and carved out a flute
                          from the thigh-bone


but by then it was too late to ask for autographs
so noone believes this story
but I was there
you were too, weren't you?

                 "It is a green day."
                  Robert Creeley.

This is why 
I'm Robert Johnson's
natural child
why I write poems
like blues
like jazz
one fat note
following another
like green elk 
bounding
through sleep
why the narrator
is never neutral
why a surf
of heartbeats
piles onto
the shore;

Because Bob Kaufmann
is dead,
Ginsberg is dead,
Bukowski long gone,
because I'm alive
because words
are bullets
at 3 am
because poems
shouldn't be
invisible
or wallpaper
or sacrificed
to some 
sheepskin knives
all the time

Because Celan
left the camps
with poems
stuffed in his
pockets
because
Hart Crane
died worddrunk
and lonely,
because Viv Eliot
starved on silence

& because
I am 
alive.