Dale Champlin, Praise Be 2, Collage, 2021
St. Simeon Stylites
On a pillar on
your way to heaven
without a touch
of earth, so it
is said, yet food
pulled up by pulley,
excrement let down—
no escaping earth.
So, old boy, you know
as you know bites
of flies, welts of sun,
you are a poet,
rising above,
trying to take
nourishment from air,
confusing day with night,
pissing from your column.
You lower poems
in your scribbling hand
with any bucket of shit:
My cursed life, a man
who wishes to be gone.
I can’t rise high enough
to find myself in God.
__________________
Erik Muller