The Tattooed Poets Project: Campbell Steele

Today's poem comes to us from Campbell Steele:

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 Campbell'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.