shepherd song

there is an island of supermen that zarathustra flies over, where there are only men with shrunken bodies--a street vendor is nothing but a giant ear, there's an eyeball kid, a size fifty foot with a torso smaller than a coke bottle.  their existence is a metaphor for the new genius, nietzsche's new definition of beauty, all crescendo with no diminuendo, like cancer. the soul starved by the artist's appetite.

this has been a hard year, that has sent me back to my body.  the mind that was overwhelmed with swallowing nietzche's music in lento, again and again, like a canibal his guru, has moved on.  i wrote some shepherd songs, then some dog cries, now a domesticated form, atomic servility, nature poetry, sniffing and pawing with words again.
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my neck my heart my haunches
i’m almost certain i was built
to drag dead geese from the marsh grasses

but here i am in what passes

for a man’s body

living no more than an animal existence

until i see

far out past the fog and phragmites

and the formless frenzy of biting flies

harassing the brackish water

another creature, twice as beautiful as me

and i know she knows my name

and gives me the pleasure sometimes of taking

what little i have to give away