- Keith Banner
Archival
it's never easy
to keep people out of
the stock footage
inside your brain
that brain,
by the way,
always trying
very hard
to turn everything
you see
feel
experience
into your own personal little
you-tube
what you want
what you
need to
feel to make it all matter
this is
about
one
person
who is not me
and i will never be him
and the stock footage
instructs and
dumbfounds more than soothes
he spent his
life
stubbornly in pursuit
of a life
he could not make
but in trying to make it
he made
a life
and that life
can't be validated
any other way
outside of
a sort of respect
you can't
explain
you can't verify or
even
compute
you can't joke about it
either because it was
his joke
first he wanted to be a
clown
and clowns are
well
they are clowns
second
he wanted
to be a construction-worker
but he never got to go there
and in all his years and
in everything he
left behind
he became his own
spectacular ghost
even while
alive
and he haunts
me right now
without one word
without
spookiness
just this emotion
i can't
unscramble
or detail
this is about
him and what is left of him
that's all i got

Link to Raymond's archive: http://raymondthundersky.org/archive/