Hail Mary, full of grace . . .

So, I've been having all these thoughts about the impending apocalypse lately. The war in Kosovo may end up as WWIII, the planet's gone to shit, etc. etc. I've also been reading a lot of 'millenium' plays, anxiety over the turn of the centuries...in Elaine Showalter's book Sexual Anarchy she admits that "for some years already we have become accustomed to the electric signs of apocalypse, or rather those troubling signals of 'Apocalypse From Now On,' as Susan Sontag puts it, that seem characteristic of late-twentieth-century life---dire predictions of disasters that never exactly happen, or perhaps have invisibly happened already---the greenhouse effect, the stock market crash, the nuclear threat, AIDS, terrorism, crime, urban decay, crack . . ." yeah. I've been having all these thoughts about THE END as a concept. Nothing concrete. I suppose that's why some of these poems are so . . . impressionistic??? random???

breach birth

she sits pleasant

under glass

legs pressed

tight

toward the ankles

up end the whole task, mommy. go on---

defy gravity.

hard to make out the letters from this distance.

difficult to gage the direction

of the wind,

to see the stars,

to summon

courage from her breath.

& mary made the winters tingle.

mary cut the chord herself. & she

don't hold too much faith in laughter anymore.

don't like or trust men who smell of the land,

don't read the newspapers or watch t.v.

so when the shit goes down

she'll be prepared.

mary totes an AK-47. mary knows the score:

"the word is born! the word is born!"

we have to save ourselves . . .

written 4.9.99