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