The depth of my soul cannot be measured by the lack of currency
in my possession.
The coins of your success do not notch failure in my heart, which
lies forever in your thoughts.

Many talented Golem walk, wander the streets of cities, such as
Nashville and Toronto, convinced of their importance. They light
the pages of the military’s internet.
They are not my army. But your conscripts into the columns, churning
towards honey and God amid the eternal dust.

The secret you keep from everyone is: nothing you have or possess
will be kept safe; everything will be taken, everyone lost is already found,
nothing you task is sacred or profound.

I am the thief who has stolen these moments, remaining
unconvinced the poet’s garret suggests anything, but the poverty of
your own inabilities you please yourselves to call imaginations.

More wealth is mine than you could dream. And that is how I keep
the world of your possessions, with a benediction and a song: a heartbeat.

Dance now, in your cage of bones, as the flames burn higher. Don’t
ask me to help when all along I have done what I can, offered sustenance:
thrown all things up in the air the better to be seen.

And all you’ve done is to dispatch the crows to steal the shining stars
and pretty things you could never hope to own.

This is the embrace, the kiss you have been waiting for: a secret even
now you have lusted after, and towards.

There is no end.

©Dean Baker

Quotes from some Reviews:

“The most unique set of poems I have ever read.” “Having read DARK EARTH by Dean Baker my first reaction is WOW. This was written for me.”

“Dean is a true comic poet as well, full of those sly interventions and evasions, slights of self, recriminations and elisions… He’s the kind of poet that gets under your skin and stays there like a song in some dark noir alley that sings to you of love and death suckled on good old home-grown truth. Through his exceptional and distinctive poems and prose poems you will be fully engaged…”

“The key to Dean’s art is its unique subtle narration of certain moments that are never revealed in the full natural disclosure of facts, but are rather revealed more subtly in the voicing of certain affective relations between memory and mind in this ongoing inquisition with the sordidness of our unlived lives.”

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