Monday, February 27, 2006

Headless Horseman

The Headless Horseman Has Left His Tribe
Said a woman at the checkpoint in her eyes
Her son was a suicide bomber and she wasn’t yet
She collected the well wishes and cashed the checks

I focused on her facial expression to get me thru the hills
Chinooks swept me into a caravan of diplomatic stills
Every rock that could have been thrown went under the wheel
I thought about the Shahikat valley as if from here it was real

The militia sat eating during the day’s prayers I took a poll
How many had seen a chest explode and who fired into the hole
The headless horseman carried a copy of the New Yorker
He laughed and kicked the tires and asked how much longer

We’re going to explode a yellow cake of debris
From McArthur’s grave to the homes of you and me
The headless horseman has left his tribe
And there’s no going back to the other side

- Chris Mansel

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

untitled

My American flag doesn’t have any white or red
It’s all in blue and flies its rainy days over my head
It’s got a star for me and yes it’s got a star for you
They’re laid out in a graveyard design in gray
It didn’t have to be it just turned out that way

- Chris Mansel

Friday, February 17, 2006

Each Truth, Each Lie

(The title is a line from Dylan Thomas’s poem, This Side Of The Truth)

This piece is dedicated with love to the Brother’s Grimm Jake Berry and Hank Lazer


The wilderness is like a shallow river, a skin straight from the bark of the tree that acquired its nutrients from the wilderness, the river closing itself off from what made the wilderness a jungle. From the wilderness we have encountered many beings and we have learned from all of them. Cast not out our brothers you could say and our enemies as foes be blessed with our constant attention. A slain enemy is a confidant in the ways in which you stay alive, a slain enemy like a body in an autopsy is a confidant in the ways you stay alive and while on the table the body which is open to the air resembles a ghost that has had skin stretched over it as to defer itself from the one examining it. A coagulated naturalist could find disgrace in silence, an embrace so immodest as to recall the elegance of a tradesman watching the tools of his trade wash away in the river as his limbs hang lifeless.
Joseph Wolf Shenk writes in his book Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness, “The perception of reality is called mentally healthy, ‘one textbook declares, “when what the individual sees corresponds to what is actually there.” The wilderness becomes barren when the ship of discovery runs aground. The earth doesn’t swallow the ship whole but acts as a port of extradition when depression enters the sea like wilderness shore of reason and accountability.
An element of depression is fear of success or something like that; I think I read it somewhere. All I know is that while I have suffered intricately from this disease I have never sat back and wondered if I was successful I would have to blow my brains out. Fear is farther away than courage. Courage like the perspective of our enemies is at best alleged and gaunt, but it must also be kept in mind that a revengeful for can also become a revengeful ally with a shopping list of deal breakers, requirements and stacks of affidavits to the contrary and so it goes with depression.


- Chris Mansel

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

That Isn't God's Voice

“A scream that’s all dawn.”

- Ferruccio Brugharo


The tropics of my cancer have never known disease
My heaven’s head is severed in a replica of HIV
A death head’s spiral returning to the ground
Its tightens slowly and unravels without a sound

Sam Peckinpah in California prison facial tattoos
Sunsets and horses running into the ocean blue
Emigrated to death row from the scene of the crime
A sixth century weapon used now for the last time

A sister’s lover and wrenched and slow obscenities
Cold cooking oil and Robert Browning’s plea
Knuckles disappear and the face seems to tighten
The phone doesn’t ring and the night seems to brighten

Chorus:

It’s all short quick breaths downstage
Chemical inserted murder on a page
The quilt is a picture of the Buddha child
Unable to smile he sits under a tree awhile


- Chris Mansel