To visit the webpage of A.F. Moritz Books available from www.chapters.ca Body of Insomnia (Translations) Conflicting Desire Houseboat on the Styx Rest on the Flight Into Egypt The Ruined Cottage Mahoning ________ For more Poets

A.F. Moritz Clarity The summer gathers fire again and breathes after the choke in the wet heat. You could all of a sudden drop down dead on your way home in the midst of your so, your sun-apparent vigor. You’ve been evil, never kind, to the ones you know. Poor, you’ve hidden from them in your guilt house of not possessing what you say they want, when what they wanted was to touch. You’ll be kind immediately, as soon as you can reach them, tomorrow. But you can’t move and they’re not here and in the meantime what to do with this instant, since in the next one you might drop down dead. Some are informed, they say, by fear. But to you it’s not clear, it’s still not clear, it’s never clear. Maybe believe blind panic is a prayer. The Background: Mastectomy Lucky one, the worst injustice you are victim of, that life hates life and you have to choose between them. Your breasts are suddenly the opposite color of human flesh, that tone called pit, or freedom. Freedom for which fire became man, said the sad sage with the smoke signal of his unconsummated burning. Looking at you I was understanding that all prayers were for injustice: Give me a way to work, meaning, Part the crowd. Part me the crowd in the terminal ward, in the academy part it, and at the trough my part, the part of the whole, the cylinder of water that walks over the land undrunk, crystalline, revolving, free, and by the sheer pure drunken power of synecdoche creates me the container that cannot exist, the glass to shape me shapely and forever let me be seen and see. Essay on the Guilty Guilt is continually sponged off and this is the action, evidence and presence of God. We think of the infant as clean and need to know it as cleanliness so satire can reconceive it as an engine of shit and mephitis, of soul-destroying and infinitely nonprogressive undialectical howls. If satire did not have the infantile cleanness to break its heart on, the purity ever renewed despite all stuprafaction, the feckless body lighter than spirit despite all vituperation and reduction, if satire were not perpetually defeated, she would suicide, despising self and victory. And then we would be alone wholly and without satire how could we live? So guilt is continually sponged off and this is God’s providence, and the fecal wrung-out water is the part of it all that chose you, O proclaimer of guilt. What Glandular City Nervrose, you’re spending life as you wanted to and still you hate it. Passing by rare green blades hyphenated in mud, and children turned out from the university, their black or golden hair divided by the comb into twelve elegant flumes as the cataract is divided by the hydroelectric dam. The very word is like a curse to knell me from treetop to sole with angelus pigeons. Three chronometrically cured oak leaves, dirty gold, clack together, persistent marching into April. And my traditional betrayal of the verses of air. My cool longing to be warm. Also the lithe young squatting of a dog. Sole and solar nudity. Lazy regurgitations of long digested thought. Tintern Abbey in the cracks. Groined shadow no campanile casts. Breeze, reminisce, cold breeze, hot star, and brow unbent, burnt. What glandular city throws out and up, mist mask the size of a blink on an azure face, you founded on tired revolving. Dandelion Through the infinite limits of the night in ruins goes the loud mumbler with only his sound— his sounds but they’re all one. He has a theory unbeknownst to himself, or a theory has him, that the production of syllables is a sort of eminence level with the unbelievably flat terrain, and their disconnect is gospel. He preaches the whoredom of the cunt and castration for all the inventors of words and of the chains that gang them to efficacy along crumbled roads. He wants to invent all this. He wishes it were still only a tar pit and a jail of twitching bodies, to be released cell by cell as a fertile chaos, not living and undead, too complex and self-repetitive to be intelligent. The women sniff him suspiciously: the same old obsessive hatred of their sex, flattering but lethal. And me too: I smell his loneliness and feel the winged knife flying this way with two dripping chunks of flesh in its claws: he wants to bore me the hole I don’t have. How right to shake my head and it all disappears, I’m wondering again why dandelions burn so terribly and cool on the ragged slope with its one wild apple tree. I’m five years old and soon will acquire pity for the happy processions I hate at plant gates, on perfect roads. But now it’s right to go back, taking my wife along, to naked five in the fiery dandelion shade, the unaccountable child impotence, seed of our present excitement. Returning from Wallace Stevens I found a great black beetle on the sidewalk struggling overturned, and righted it, and set it in a flowerbed, where it hurried on blindly from my point of view to further adventure. And this brief story that seems to be a salvific meaning recommended, a memorial of a sentiment, self-exculpation and self-praise, is in reality a way of mentioning the great black beetle, the one way the mouth can handle it, which in no other may be kissed or tasted. It might seem unnecessary to approach the black sun like this, since it comes near automatically, and I would have to recall each point on the way to know if my approximation is pure error or the more likely dither. Meanwhile, no longer content with philosophy, others do social research, collecting opinions from forms, pure spirits, horizons, and omega points, to determine accurately just exactly what is unknown. They haven’t found if the black beetle finally escaped any more than I did, but so please mindless spring, master of coincidences, she and I may meet again.