A Writing That Could Have Been Poem by Michael Timothy Rose

The words that could have been
like Whitman,
who in the North, spoke of songs,

scattered in dead grasslands
in wet-leaf, broken compass knives
bright red metal, metal ball points

drawing paint from paper flesh
from those harsher men at war,
having had emptily written our histories,

s c a t t e r e

-d

before

ringing the unsilent note not spoken
enough of
in this literature, such as those not intangible
stipples of human misery, laying cluttered in dirt piles
Across the desert road, across bodies of starvation of fatigue of humanity in blood and ruined life,

Like

points

of

demograph

-y.

I speak of
trails of tears to the western United States
by calloused hands,
by burning guns, whose

words left

the loose-leaf dry beyond
teary reminders, or

Hagrid-mâché foot prints
on paper thin thoughts
scrabbling in the margins, or

wet paint droplets
traveling in spirals
behind scribbles
of some remorseless ink,
red-picket, red-
skewer ink, whose

Need for voice,
whose need for
Four more beginning words
Of plundering
Will not be quenched,
Never without four, four hundred, nor four thousand
Unsacrificed lives
That lie, lay unspoken
At the sea green bottom,
The world-wide trench,
That lay
unthought-of at the rotting remiss

Edge

Of human inexorbable
wretchedness,
That lay
forgotten
Or unspoken
Among the final Titanic
Age of Wreckage,
That lay
Dissembled and
Thought of
In remorseful, tactile fingers,
that lay
before these fingers. I land heavily,
even loudly!

-!

Against the blackened keys.

We write our histories
Not in nail clippings,
Not in truth for misery,
Not for Simplicity for Humanity,

But in mistrust,
In
Arrogance. Tidal waves
Of arrogance. So let us not forget.

Tears. Blood. Inexorbable.

Sadnes

-s.