IDLER'S PRACTICE:
Earlier in my life I used to be Sheriff of Three Corners,
walking from the curb garden into the street
holding my wooden rake, forcing traffic
to slow down as drivers tried cutting through
the stop light on Tieton. Now my practice
is to hold the hose, ignoring the underground
sprinkler system while remaining in the yard.
This is not a treatise on the weird,
although I've been told there's a t-shirt
riffing on the Beatitudes, Blessed
are the Weird, which triggered things like
up the down staircase,
book that came looking for me at 13,
had I left them, even then, the writers?
not dreaming as much as knowing
Jesus lived daily with the same shit.
And what about John? John
in the water up to his waist,
saying, Not me, not me, settle down!
Time traveling through music
and beyond the left hand, that first
Christian congregation, criminals
with square hand-forged nails hammered
through tissue and bone, one
with the man in the middle abandoned
and ensuring that the pews would fill
and empty, over and over again
searching for the easier way,
they're pretty fucking weird too,
two thousand years of them,
Easy, easy, let's try
it through here!
Mundane. Solipsistic. Take a year,
take 1968, [Not fair! Not fair!]
Just the chance that coming of age
here, makes normal participation
in American democracy impossible.
Beyond that walking in the unread,
and passed over texts, gum-grease,
protolapsis uh de
cutinary linin',
who could Zora send that one to
beside bilingual Langston
laughing into fragmented normality
momentary home, Don't pass me by,
Just one plea, No more, No more,
and how many ever asked to see
the badge, those tin pins, copper-
wired by the Dada jeweler, weird!
Weird! Weird! Hose you. You.
Jim Bodeen
10 September 2018
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