Terry Adams
Terry Adams MCs the poetry festival each September at the Beat Museum in San Francisco. He has poems in Poetry Magazine (Chicago), Witness, The Sun, The Sand Hill Review, etc. His current book is Adam’s Ribs, from Off The Grid Press (Weld, Maine). He restored and lives in Ken Kesey’s infamous old cabin in La Honda, California.
I am waiting that everything you say
I am waiting that everything you say will be held against you in a court of law
I am waiting that everything you say will be repeated in the court of the hereafter.
I am waiting that everything you say was said before.
I am waiting that everything you say is the only way you touch.
I am waiting that everything you say is building your home
I am waiting that everything you say will not lie down in your casket
I am waiting that everything you say is solid as anger and invisible as the Pentagon.
I am waiting that everything you say is hoarse with voices of ancient fire and
cried through the breath of the hunted
I am waiting that everything you say is spelled in the ink of need
I am waiting that everything you say begins the reconstruction of the mind
I am waiting that everything you say is the shape of music and the power of strawberries
I am waiting that everything you say lightens the burden of the future
anything you say should be complete in the time it takes
to give your cat an enema
the body is the nun of your lonely thoughts
the priest of our oldest wishes.
Your wireless minutes have exceeded their limits you have unused
icons on your desktop I am waiting that everything you say
your voice is a vote for the party of the unspeakable
your voice is a claim for the innocence of hell
I am waiting that everything you say will drag you by the nape of your neck
We are caretakers in fire-watch towers in a single forest,
We are tenders of medieval gardens,
We are silent at the oil cloth table light bulb vigil
high over sunflowers abandoned and bending
We are champagne wedding in earliest sun
we are Martin Luther at the celestial suggestion box
which face is yours at the Greyhound window — are you reflected
in the glass of night?
Are you the spark advancing along the beach
Are you slung across a saddle on the way to Kabul
Is yours the scream that will stop the clatter of machineguns
Are you electrocuted at the microphone
Your sentence will pardon the eyeless and open the ears that are buried in doors
You are an unlawful assembly
you are an unlawful assembly
The rock of the law is the sand around your feet
Your description of the sunrise begins the healing of the world
Your description of the spirit is the birth of the Spirit
Your question is the question the Universe has been waiting for
Your command tells the future to begin
you are shuffling a stack of grammar parts at a language fire
under the freeway
you are advancing the spark in the motor of breath
Shake your can of verbs onto the bar top
buy a round of soul for the vagrant children
Is there a lighted wick crackling along the base of your spine
Is there a lighted wick crackling in the base of your spine