this moment / Sonnet

this moment

it's a farce, the great actors, the great poets, the great
statesmen, the great painters, the great composers, the
great loves,
it's a farce, a farce, a farce,
history and the recording of it,
forget it, forget it.

you must begin all over again.
throw all that out.
all of them out

you are alone with now.

look at your fingernails.
touch your nose.

begin.

the day flings itself upon
you.


Sonnet 

One who speaks of the multifariousness of voices
one through whom the voices speak speaks twice
one through rapt inflections breath on fire
once as metal fathers rising in the blood
the voice becoming wire and things said through it
thinner still so that
one who standing on the outside of a logos looking in
is one who sits within and reaching for the phone
arrives at speech his own by way of voices
he but replicates and theirs ventriloquized in him
are later written down: tundra, reindeer
permafrost that lives beneath the breath
all Spring partly vocable and partly simply cold;
the witness is unspeakable someone dead
who speaks the name a footstep leaves ahead.

Poem: "this moment," Charles Bukowski, from "what matters most is how well you walk through the fire." 1999. 
Poem: "Sonnet," Michael Davidson, from "Post Hoc." 1990. 
Photo: "Vegas Hustle," Tony Rohrbach