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| (Placitas Audiences Anasazi Fields Winery & Thunderbird Bar) |
We being all of us
For is anything ever finished even in death?
Do you lecture? Do you get paid for it?
Then you're a professional lecturer: I'm an amateur.
Or maybe I'm just finishing things up
while it seems like I'm starting over & over
and I'm here all by myself: utterly backward.
Lost in the dark, far from a moralist: a wacky speech maker.
Who listens?
Who pays?
The professional audience.
Voice I would grab, hold me above myself
and give me to them, but also, all of us.
Every goddamned one of us is the same species.
Amateur professional alike: known & unknown,
beginning & possible end.
The voice is its own audience: who knows what will come.
Will anybody read what words lips listen to?
And ears & brain of one of this too big species?
I am only me finishing everything off I've begun.
Really only wanting to reach one audience
one impossible audience:
the fan-tailed pigeons that used to come & eat our
worm-infested cherries & keep the cherry fruit-fly under control.
Where are you, that used to come in a flock just when the cherries were ripe?
Did you get hunted out by kids & ignorant sons of bitches of my species?
Poisoned by over-pesticiding farmers & gardeners?
Why aren't you here to eat up this wormy fruit & get
the bug population down?
If I cd only reach that audience as you flocked large & loud
from tree to tree, eating your share, my saying this
loud but not clear to you, or would it be,
I'd be the professional I could be, with an audience that is
more than me.
And that would be the beginning of something better than me.
/larry goodell / placitas, new mexico / from Outer Space Workout, 1994 and LISTEN to the poet reading this here.
larry goodell/ placitas, new mexico / usa
/7Jul94
