does the knife can the hand whet the delta

river
we can't tell if you give us ground
do you feed on us
no more wealth delta
levee levee stop that dancing
be silt and sand not rock
grind against bricks and shit tin shacks

we built our hands here
we needed a land to die on
we got one
who hasn't forgotten their lover
yet there are tides
waves of hands
ink dripping from wounds
salt mist above sand wanders like islands
like leadfooted ghosts

mercy
you fall from out palms end after end
if there is no body to smother
no brother to die at some hand
what will we want badly no more
our bodies stone hard
a knife lifted from switch grass
the shattered milk glass of a lighting rod
I cannot whitewash all these shadows

the body lyric

we'll tell her the influence of erosion
a radio in the sink
the real she in saltmoon water

if all the world is made of flesh
we'll tell her thank the land for giving us the body

to stand a breath from the mouth of the body
the earth that fills this body the earth we'll tell her

to watch the Gulf jump into the land mouth
to die relentlessly with our hammerlit memory

the rain become bullets like boning knives
the gulf that will not stop upon the sand

with this half-hung sky this bodywide lyric
a hangfire memory solders our arteries
at each our wrist and thigh

dismantlion

we go handfirst into the nightmare truth
to see without our eyes
interposed matter wider than reality
smaller than city-mind circuitry

the wide-angle heart opens
the lens to let us burn the light
slowly and if some any thing
can be delight can it be
the nothingness hinged to no sign
or symbol but the sensation of being
the hidden is in every word
to climb out of the letters

the entrance out of the eye

I've read the white sand in sunlight wanted no darkness about the water no night
to lift light from grime some say history threw live chickens down chimneys
once the boys ran out she says Louis Franklin was the door Henry Franklin the dreamer
you don't need something more to explain something more
the ram the resistance the past and the christening she waits to die again
lies in the chair imagines her heart stopped and here's where we get to the future
to the worst things that will ever happen in the american book of the dead