Save it for the Paper 11/08

Save it for the Paper

Please, spare me the details keep your news
I don’t have the time, all I got I could lose,
would lose gladly if it freed me from the likes of you...

There are thoughts that are better left unspoken, saved for paper
saved for that private sacred space, not to be intoned or articulated
or allowed to take on a life in thin air, metamorphosed into neural memory
and passed around till distorted and taken out of context and then spat at you, or painted on your house or hey maybe even news for the local paper...

I don’t want to be held accountable for every thought. I don’t want to read my journal at poetry readings – as if it were art, as if- it were beautiful, artful, well-worked, worked out, word – thought – feelings – images-as if it were news, as if it were important, even to me.
And sometimes it’s all so important to me, it’s so important I’m struck with the necessity of taking it to paper – to hold it still long enough to lure the lines into burning arrows of insight or cool flows of relief or warm languid layers of truth that set all the tumblers of the locks to open and we get released again, for as long as we can remember it – this time. Maybe it turns into my permanent transformation till impermanence collects it’s final due – our undoing, when no news matters, though we do write obituaries – they do seem to matter that week and then they don’t – we save them for the paper

And we save the paper, the bags of recycling for pick-up or for starting the wood stove – up in smoke – up into the ethers where all news goes whether spoken or written eventually.

Cultural genocide, book burnings, political posters plastered incognito in the dark of night, Che Gravera on my bright red t-shirt in stark black block print, that t-shirt now falling apart, long after any conversation of the movement, who cares? Who remembers? Who want’s to know?

It’s election day. We all wait in anticipation of the news, the pundits pontificating their spoken word into our personal and collective ethers, like breath that comes and goes. Tomorrow the special edition election headlines will tell us our fates from the newspaper boxes on street corners, they’ll be left on diner counters, with coffee cup rings and worn edges. The paper sits there quietly waiting to be read, it may have bold glaring headlines but you can always look away. The pundits all spinning, making the most of a historical event – and I can’t help but think that even with 40 channels spinning it 24/7 we won’t really know what’s going on anyway...