MIPOESIAS VOLUME 24, ISSUE 1 ~ JANUARY 2011


Third Draft, Suicide Note, Found in a Book Sam Rasnake


– Yukio Mishima to Yukio Mishima, November 1970


Your life is craft, a terrible shadow of words in the knot of sword vs. pen, scratched in blood for all the days turned years of child to man to art – as it was intended, as its truth and perfect purpose drift the hard silence of an empty, miserable world and the modern guise you’ve learned to hate


Truth always hides in art, you say, in a stroke of the pen, long sweep of the brush, the plucked string, in sad laughter of grief, and the Noh, Kabuki, St. Sebastian, all rites of love and death under a bleeding sun, the sky as cold as the deepest winter in Japan –


The horses have fled, the pavilion, burned, and the woman of pain with her dark razor watches over your sleep, your last day, last moment, last samurai


The quiet, steady motion of the hand, such beauty beyond words, is your art


Sam Rasnake’s work has appeared recently in FRiGG, OCHO, BLIP, Shampoo, Poets / Artists, Six Sentences, Naugatuck River Review, Dogzplot, Ramshackle Review, A-Minor Magazine, and BluePrintReview, as well as the anthologies Best of the Web 2009 (Dzanc Books) and BOXCAR Poetry Review Anthology 2. His most recent collections are Lessons in Morphology (GOSS183) and Inside a Broken Clock (Finishing Line Press). Rasnake edits Blue Fifth Review, an online journal of poetry, flash, and art.


www.mipoesias.com


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36