The Criminal spies youth
From his distance
By its step,
Its stoop,
Its sullen curl of lip,
Its stormy sadness,
The sure sweep of its arm reaching effortlessly for an apple,
The hand that twists the top off a soda bottle—
It is the beauty of a run-on sentence,
Of fire that burns without consuming its own fuel,
Fire that cannot be hidden,
Not even beneath a bushel.
Avoid that man
If you can;
He is dangerous,
A criminal,
A criminal Ordinary:
"Crime is so ordinary."
"You mean crime is ordinary."
Crime is the ordinary.
An ordinary imposes
Necessary discipline.
The territory had been divided
And this county given to him.
The Criminal says,
"Please, all my friends call me Pitcher.
You can call me Jake."
I hope that you never
Meet a man named Jake.
"How's that again?"
He stands at his window;
The night is quiet.
"It takes a lot of suffering, anger, and fear
To produce this much peace."
He sighs,
Imagines the skies,
Thinks, "This sad boring town
Must seem quite different
When seen from above;
There's always something slightly stunning
About a settlement in a wasteland.
"Here's the thing,
I am a stranger here,
Not just this town
But the entire continent.
I could not identify
A single native tree or
Wildflower or
Bird,
Except maybe a cardinal.
"I keep my money hidden
Beneath a bushel."
He calls his bagman:
"Tammy Malone still delinquent?"
"She don’t got the money, boss—."
"Cancel her ticket."
Last year he caught
An Undercover Cop
Working the gang:
"Drop your gun flatfoot,
And turn around.
Take him to the cornfields!"
That poor handsome Cop:
Blonde hair
Blue eyes,
Moon limned,
Bullet brimmed,
Brain dimmed,
With his law and his mandate.
"Fuck'm."
And then two years ago
It was the Reporter from the student newspaper.
"That upset me more than losing my girlfriend.
Oh wait, that was my girlfriend,
Ha ha!
I thought she was all Blair,
But turns out she had a little Natalie thing going on,
She tried to threaten me,
'Oh the stories I could write,'
I think she thought it was cute,
But I snapped her neck right then-and-there,
And she died tragically in a car accident
Driving home from the mall."
The Criminal separates sheep and goats;
He builds a new Jerusalem.
Margaret,
Bart,
Sebastian
Rejoice:
He will crush you
He will cut you,
He will cut you if he can,
Count you,
Measure you,
Divide you,
Pierce you with ecstasy.
"What the—?"
Nobody ever accused God
Of too light a touch.
A depression in Main Street
In front of Pizza Hut
Marks the spot of a subterranean spring,
Which one mile west
Rises,
Becomes a creek,
Miracle of subsurface saturation,
Lilting liquefaction,
Beauty of a run-on sentence.
There are gods, and there are the gods,
And there is a god.
And then there is God,
A day of reckoning,
An effect of language,
More specifically, of speech,
Governed by the laws of physics,
Succumbing to the laws of civilization,
Returning, diminished, to its creator.
According to anthropologists,
A word represses meaning,
Rather than expressing it.
It is a diode on a circuit board in a giant machine.
Suffering, for example, is only a word,
And its definition is:
Not not-suffering.
"Your suffering, being unreal,
Could be turned off like a switch."
If you tried to learn the rules of baseball
By studying a scoreboard,
You might think that players only get two strikes.
Don't ask,
"Who says?"
Don't ask,
"Says who?"
Don't ask these questions
If you aren't ready to hear the answers.
Somebody writes the rules,
And somebody enforces them;
Count on it.
The Criminal hears a freight train charging through town
Like a tornado,
Chased from above
By heat lightning in the clouds.
All day the air has been hot,
But the temperature now drops and
Barometric pressure too;
Sticks and young tree branches
Gust down Main Street.
"You don't count for nothin' in this town,
If you don't got enemies,
And I got 'em."
The Criminal must tirelessly reckon.
He reckons, for example, with matter.
And of all the properties of matter,
Wetness confounds him most.
He is terrorized by the memory of
A water fountain in the rain,
Such unstriven abundance,
Wasteless extravagance,
Effortless amplitude.
The fountain,
Unboundaried by rain,
Blurred into, merged with,
Its setting, its universe,
Like an oil painting onto which a mist of solvent has been sprayed.
How can something be
Identical to its property?
"I long for an undivided heart,
Singleness of mind and purpose,
But I am divided."
If God did not intend for us to be divided,
Then he would not cause us to feel strange,
After a matinee,
Walking from darkened theater
Into bright sunny day,
Guiltily blinking pleasure
From our suddenly sun-assaulted eyes.
And he would not cause us to love others most strongly,
And most purely,
When we are about to lose them forever.
David says
God divided his own Word seven times
Before finding it sufficiently pure.
Purity is a quantity, not a quality,
God preferring to express himself mathematically,
For example in a reckoning.
Humans, on the other hand,
Will rack a reckoning like a gun.
And yet there is the wren
Resting weightlessly on an arcing stem of springtime Solomon's Seal;
And the other side of summer
Is the nuthatch
In the aster weed,
Meaning nothing.