THIS MORNING
I am shaving.
And the sallow-faced man next door is shaving.
And the man whose life will be changed when a girl talks
to him in the subway, and the president of Revco Steel—they are shaving.
And the man who will capsize in a boat today and breathe in the pure water
of the lake and gaze sightless up at the shimmering sun— he is shaving.
And the man who will commit murder today destroying the only love
he has ever known, though as yet his anger is still asleep,
and the man who will return from a day
hunched at his desk,
his hair falling over his ledgers,
and the man who before sunset will slice his wrists over the sink—they are all shaving
—over the upper lip,
under the sloping jaw,
lathered face and razor in the mirror
but no revelations there...no hint today.
We will walk out to the cool morning
where newspapers whirl in the wind,
out to the street that holds the buildings together.
But the premonitions are not quite strong enough—
they rise to the pure darkness of space
or lie beneath the slow wheels of a train.
Dark fears are still asleep in the blood as we walk our ways
and there is no unusual animal behavior
to warn of the earthquakes to come.


-----john dickson +august 1 2009

in order to copy and paste this poem
i was forced to take it out of prose poem copy as it came to my blogspace
and rework the structure in something
of a poetic flow although quite probably not the one determined by the poet in the composition of this poem therefor it could be said i have appropriated this poem perhaps misappropriated this pome
i place it here as a way of honoring
a man who wrote poems lived worked and died
in spite of the linebreak editing enforced by the medium in which i now write i think the pome reads as a good one
and should be read
out loud