I Do Not Live As Myself

I DO NOT LIVE AS MYSELF

- (SELF PORTRAIT @ AGE 61)


I do not live as myself, for
I am that lonely
family man living in
the shipwrecked singular,
one raised to
the comings and going of many
siblings of homestead bustle,
one once well used
to be for wife and children,
as to grandchildren,
alas, all flown,
and anomic of me.

For I have become
as one chosen for a sentence
of exile in the wars
of culture and value against
that family, one chosen
to be an example
as if It was I asked and risked too
much in the domestic
of uncivil war,
cared too much for
old ways even then being despised,
cared for the old hat
of the anomalies of eternity that
break through the times
in this time I have ever ready
to use on my hands like
a loaded gun which some want to see
as having only blanks
in the ticking breech, and yet,
my potency is still by me as
I do not live as myself - for I am
the the father, an old man
before my time in a time made not mine,
alive as if in Latin,
exiled to being solo as witness, for
making contemporary
a testimony to what went down here
in a world that wants
to forget that to testify in true
testimony only comes of
such testes with which I still hang
- and give out thus.

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