Where Is the Audience?

(Placitas Audiences Anasazi Fields Winery & Thunderbird Bar)

We'll start at the beginning & before that's over we'll be done. 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