Rememory

As always, My Special Camping Trip provides much inspiration. Hope some happy ones will follow--it was a good time, tho you'd never know it from these lugubrious lines.

Four Desires and Forgetting

That burning cross becomes a decoration to dance beside--
Dancing, my hair whips, free, a transgression,
Our naked feet on the grass, another kind of transgression,
WIth every step another rule is broken; every breath, stolen.
My desire is to dance. Not to know.

It's a hard job to find a mirror in this place,
One that isn't dark, clouded, or even flecked with piss.
My desire is to be in the place past caring.
Because it will always be denied me, it has become
My greatest desire. How by some physic, slant or blessed,
Has the sharpness of the word and symbol been blunted?
A toy weapon, then a pencil sketch of the weapon,
Then a crumple of paper to ignite a bit of tinder.

On the second day I tell you I will do anything you desire.
Forgetting your own desire to follow another's feels like freedom.
This finds me on the most holy day a little drunk
And following orders from a German. I am myself a German.
The third desire, I grasp at every day:
I want to have no part in them. I want to call another
The other, to draw a hard line in the sand.
We all know what happens to sand.

We have forgotten more atrocities than it is possible
For us to mourn. We could look at the grass beneath
Our bare feet and see symbols of each one, and
Numbers, too, see them, there in the crushed blades?

On the first day I was on my knees on the splintered
Rough wood floor of the uppermost room in the hidden temple.
In transgression I fulfill the fourth desire: To increase the store of bliss
Until it is numbered in the stars.