Wednesday, April 28, 2010

The Tattooed Poets Project: Steele Campbell

Today's poem comes to us from Steele Campbell:



My Words Are Bad Tonight
I
Lord I am not worthy
Lord
I am not worthy
but I speak words only
I should not be here
you should
proud at the lectern
springboarding
to heaven with your voices
I have nothing dazzling to say
all is
over-worn
cliché
not what you want
and I’ll just sit
quiet
with my failures
folded in my pockets
or clenched in
sinful hands
II
My words are boney
lonely
dry and twiggy
like walking sticks and limbs
of old men
with memory in the bones
thrown
to still a point
of the turning world
then to cease

in scribbled immortality
and fill the depravity
with the cold
letter frozen
to the page

III
I stole these words
borrowed from the cross
prophets
dying poets
and
Webster
to dance upon
cheating tongues
these words are not new
I did not bake them
boiling with meaning for you
to lick
taste the thick
black
inky
skins of insinuation
IV
I cannot call the gods of words
rusting in oblivion
to specific form
my words
can only say
that which
no longer needs
to be said
V
So forgive me
and my verbal deficience
you’ve been
a wonderful audience
just please
don’t
clap

~~~
Head over to Tattoosday and see Steele's tattoo here.
Steele Campbell is currently living (and I mean that robustly). He is essentially transient, but has paused his peregrination at Auburn University to complete a Master’s Degree on the fiction of Marilynne Robinson. He is the recipient of the Robert Hughes Mount Jr. Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets two years running and has been published in Decompression, The Boston Literary Review, Rope and Wire and Touchstones. He is the student poetry editor of the Southern Humanities Review. You can visit him at www.steelecampbell.net.

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