RHYTHM Repetitive stresses is our rhythm A goatskin, long dead, shouting As life , yet in a stressed discord In roomed houses,

in high seas Under the rising moon of waves. I say the same many times over A body part taps to another in mind On the table, under a table of feet. In weddings a reed makes stresses With two beating drums, the lungs Under a white shirt keeping pace In operation theater ,a glass machine Writes up and down to heart's music A liquid travels in splutter sounds In its grand repetition, stressed in And out , from a recumbent body. Rhythm is a bundle of new flesh Crying from tiny lungs, a sucking Sound at a nipple, a staring at fan Tiny hands slapping at a new air Just from a dark of mother's cave. Rhythm is a forgetting of rhythm Life ebbing away against pounding A pounding lost from a bone cage Relentless pounding of life, death At space , in their eternal repetition.