10. body or luminous arena

Arena of creation the body










The body is a round enclosed house

That consists of a vast core

And a thin outer layer inside the rind.



The body as a round house includes

Under the skin an outer circle

(A single long narrow corridor

That lit only by dim lights

Runs around the core.)



On the upper rungs of some portable steps

The director of the movie of your lives

Imparts instructions

To the lot of them actors that ever touched

Or approached you.



Everyone listens with a certain nonchalance

Until alas the cops irrupt

And all of you and your (the authors’) directors flee

Pell-mell helter-skelter.



The essential ones (the brightest indeed)

Save themselves coming in.



Inside the core a circus

A vast school of art

A vast and luminous and colorful arena of creation.



All hues and tints and implements

(Pencils of flesh of gorgeous girths)

Are there for the taking by the artists

Whose objects shall shine

Summoned from the hallowed halls of

Commensurate feedback.



Joyfully one wallows in the sand

Of the circus where the footprints

Of the moving peoples and the moving cattle

Won’t ever be ascertained

By the cowered police

For the entrance and the exit into the arena

For every intimate flock

Is always unforeseeable and anyway

The cops have always been properly delayed

And misdirected

While the flocks disappear and melt into the crowd.



The arrival of the cops

Is always greeted with amused jeering

“Get thee back into the sewer!”

The more lenient shout

“Craven rats riddled with vermin!”

“Slimy lice!”

While the arduous dramatists

Are apt never niggardly in their histrionics

Even to send the worthless trespassers’ way

Torn tussocks of their tragic hair

Where poisoned needles are stuck.



The cops are nobodies

Getting smaller by the minute

Our joy of living affects their borrowed pride

Their defects bubble forth

Their ineptitude

Their crude tactics

Their shame

For they realize that indeed they don’t belong

In our circus of love.