this MuleI write you an e-mail



This Mule...........................................by Charlie Mingus


This mule is not from Moscow, this mule is not even from the South

This mule has had some learning, mainly mouth-to-mouth

This mule could be called clever, and lazy

but maybe this mule is busy, waiting and learning, hoping and planning, for a sacred kind of day

For a day when the burning of sticks and crosses is not mere child's play, but a madman in his most incandescent bloom!
Whose loveless soul is imperfection! In it's most lustrous groom!

So, stand fast, old-young mule, soon then contemplation THY BURNING HOLE AND ACHING FIRE!
thy STUBBORNESS is of the LIVING!

and cruel anxiety has begun to fade

I write you an e-mail, a rainfall of nails. The moon in seamed stockings, a lizard in the rough.

We have been laid-off from our own movie.

The tiny apologetic puddles at the back of people's eyes, the long inch of this night.

We sit in dark rows, watching intently as people go through certain pre-determined motions on a raised stage

We devote our lives to this!

How many acres and a mule? A pefect egg. A bat for the fruitfly, a million tiny shipwrecks.

How the flowers talk at railroad stations, and bus-terminals

How flowers lean in to each other, over the tarmac road

They put their bendy arms around each other

Kinetic star-children.

Nostalgic button-holes.

This world is not very big, and there is barely room in it for our love.

Boiling the asteroid in asparagus whispers

.

A red velvet throat, as inept as the rain

The hand-grenade, the lipstick.

I suppose money-cops will frost the spring, and tranquilised windows, but Christ, the grass!

Humanity, stretching out its' arms. The solemn cathedral of our bodies

And the purity of lips, when they are not wasted on speech.

Limp lice get rabies on bowling greens

Dazed helmets shudder in the sun

.

In the park, the wind pushed the branches of two trees together

I watched them, and when I close my eyes, I still see them

bonded together, all night long, in the same kiss.

g

In the center of the bull-fight, water.

b