Bring Your Alibis ANNOTATED

Bring Your Alibis, Or, Well Come

(A reply to Sub Urban’s “Cradles”)

Like Content that if tasted, you'd find delicate & deep,

pimped as out as it were better stare at fire than old,

this Stranger you've a tempted reach grows diffident to keep

in secret lies you'll soon enough agree were better  — never told.

In each — our Worlds — of made belief — we doubt — we live — we guess — we dream

& despite inviting Others in, we think ourselves alone, by force of habit, still.

Able you may be to last — but no one can at last — we all run out of steam,

& when we're out & breathe our last — that's all we ever get, or will.

Even daydreams trip the wires linked to lengths of fuse unseen,

but not — unexpected: Fitting.  That resultant devastation

is all that you can think about when you are asked where you have been

is what's confronting & confusing you, preventing explanation.

All the World's in deed a glass — remembers any looking in it

to the Machine to which we well are come — & the Ghost within, our Spirit.

Notes: (line # precedes)

1-2: Sub Urban, Cradles, v.3; 3:Countee Cullen, Youth Sings a Song of Rosebud, “Since men grow diffident at last”; 4: Cradles, v3, “Honesty is a one way gate to Hell”; 4: Cradles, l.1-2 “I live in my own world of make-believe”; 4: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, “We live as we dream, alone.” 9:Of Montreal, The Past Is A Grotesque Animal. ”But you know no matter where we are/ We're always touching by underground wires”; 11: Pink Floyd, Welcome To The Machine, “Where have you been?/It’s all right, we know where you’ve been”; 12: Aztec Two-Step, Cockroach Cacaphony, “You look away from all the thoughts & things you want & dreams you’d like to do/ But all that you can think about is what’s confronting you.”; 13 besides Shakespeare (see inset to the right), Rush, Limelight, “All the world’s indeed a stage/And we are merely players/Performers and portrayers/Each another’s audience/Outside the gilded cage”; 13: Obsolete dative construction of “remember” where that object which brings the Belovéd to my mind is said to remember the Belovéd to me. 14: Pink Floyd, Ibid., 4: Yes I am making a Dualist remark.  See figure two, below.  Also The Police, Ghost n The Machine, “Spirits In The Materal World”.  Also Sonic Youth, Evol, “In The Kingdom #19.”

 This is, a personal, yet open, communication from one poet to another, in sonnet form, by johanna Faust, for which some acknowlegement is appropriate.  Just saying.