Keith Moul’s poems and photos are published widely. Finishing Line Press will release a chap called The Future as a Picnic Lunch in 2015.
Woods crowd around our clearing. We built with privacy
in mind, our cloister of birdsong hoisted into the breeze.
Some nights, my dreams force me from my home's security
to hear rain drops rolling off big maple leaves; to threaten
night-movers that lift and turn heads toward my disturbance:
they float stone quiet, know not to resist, objects of dream.
Fauna curtail nighttime hunts, or rest in lairs or dry haunts;
chosen flora wave as night winds target stiff, twisted species
(alder shrieks) and as by lot topple those weakened and ready.
I am armed against uncertainty: my weapon, ample caliber,
ineffectual before dreams of winds, remains holstered.
read must adjust to dark. When dreams provide no aid: things
nightmarish heap upon me, blow into my ears, stingers wound me,
flip slime in my mouth and nose, like new-born slugs curious
to explore, disorder my senses, like leeches suck at my skull.
One holstered weapon, one hundred weapons firing, can not end
the horror of innocent dreaming that addles my human response.
I am not made to respond: what of faculties bound to madness?
I believe. No hypotheses of sleep and waking are necessary.
I am more alert. Dreams become athletic arguments with Freud.
I avoid barbiturates in favor of longer nights of friends' hypnosis.
"Their job, as they saw it,
was not to question but to
blindly obey." p. 488
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
by William L. Shirer
Some citizens have dreams: millions craved a Reich to last a thousand years.
But poor of spirit and rich in hate, Hitler's people hauled a twelve year
caisson
to a continental mass grave. Some now, Hitler caricatures all, seek more years.
My adventure began six months after the foul debacle in the fuehrer's bunker.
Those who recall may crave easeful deaths or conceal themselves in doom.
Through most unnatural selection, “history” emerges as versions winnow
politics, psychology and culture in dry spaces between the drops of rain,
as “facts” loosed in nature to fight the motion of pebbles among
grains of sand.
Reading history, I grasp at pebbles, I reach into forgotten diaries of genius
awaiting expectations; diaries of ordinary daily acts to live and suppress the
evil;
diaries of transparent extermination; forgotten dossiers with helpless letters;
well-worn Baedekers routing travelers over streets and roads that don't exist.
I am inclined to map my own roads, my job to blindly obey conscience in
history.
