i.

bare skin

 bare bones

nichts to offer

 nothing given

pitied and plucked

plopped upside down

stretched forth, 

like a Lazarine beggar

kicked and leaked

soured and beat sore

begging for pennies

awaiting some hand-out

pennyless, duped in

scouring nude pockets

accepting foreign coins 

given without kin

ii.

You are me

the Me i won't see

begging with nothing

a nichts wishing mercy

touch my virtue

spark my assurance

spit on my blindness

clear my failing eyes

to view You in me

in the pit of my hell

'gainst the fence-post of heaven

where Abraham rocks You

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -You only have the right to speak about the grain of truth that grows within you.  You can't talk about faith as if it's something outside of you, a kind of spiritual satellite that turns around in the heaven of ideas.  The gift of tongues takes place in the depth of a living experience.

  -It's not the living who imagine that faith is disappearing and morality is crumbling, but the dead. Whether they realize it or not, such people consider morality and faith as a product, and men and women simply as supports for a human condition.

  -If a person wants to be something more than the mouthpiece of the dead, she must let the Word percolate within her until it emerges, the same and different.

  -The word-poem doesn't get just into ones head but stirs body-consciousness into movement, like a roar of laughter.

  -To get out of oneself, to rediscover oneself, is the same thing - it's connecting with the universal. Absolute and silent within us, the words slit open the world of contradictory desires, tries to break past the barriers of egoism, expresses itself in bursts of anger and joy, revolt and prayer, and acts out a dance.  It's like the pre-verbal stage of childhood when  you found it hard to distinguish your body from the body of life, when you didn't exist as a separate individual.

  -To create literature is to give life.