9-1-1

Stuttering 9-1-1

The Marshes by the Highway

A Broken Branch

Huge Meteor

The Cloistered Nuns

    (Versus the  Realm of Realism)

Photo Caption

Dawn Over the Kitchen Table

Gravity Works!

The Poet as Karen Black

I've Got To Finish This

To Catherine In Dallas

A Parked Car Early In the War

Saint of the Week Club

Twelve Moons

The Poet Visits A Wiccan Bookstore

A Visitation

One Mississippi

Blue Milkcow, Boo

A Picture of Hell-in-Progress

Six Lessons from Madam La Zonga

Forgetting a Song

Rorschach Test

The Kind of Bullshit You Hear

Walter Benjamin Declines the  

                  Lemonade

Leaving Your Husband

I Find My Father In A Piece Of Amber Abraham Clark

I Use A Dead Language Known

      Only To Myself

Martin of Tours, As The Burning

    Towers Fall

Apparition

The earliest of these poems is from about 1980, the most recent  from today (as I write this & if we count a chunk edit).  It doesn't matter.  Chronology is narrative, intended or not, but its truth is essentially statistical. 

The number 911 has three meanings for me.  The first is the anxiety I've felt for most of  my life that  I would stutter into a total word blockage while trying to report an emergency on the phone. 

The search for articulate speech.  

The second is 91.1 FM, the frequency of radio station WFMU in the New York City area.   Becoming articulate. 

The third is,  of course,  the demonic kairos of September 11, 2001;  a moment in time & space that, for all of its shock, horror & tragedy,  briefly opened the bab-ili "Gate of God," which then closed, another terrible prophecy unheeded.

Powers,  principalities, & the Tower of Babylon.

Bob Rixon

by Bob Rixon