Journeyman
by Stephen Thomas
$15.00
The Tsunami Inc.

Journeyman

Long regarded as a most eclectic and erudite poet, this major collection makes Stephen Thomas' work available to the general public for the first time. He has been a featured reader at Bumbershoot in Seattle, at LitEruption in Portland, at the Walla Walla Poetry Party in 1991, 1992 and 1997. In 1993 he won first place in the Portland Artquake read-off for 150 poets. He currently teaches in Seattle at University Preparatory Academy and the University of Washington Extension. He served as Poetry Editor of Point No Point: A Blue Moon Reader. Thomas read recently in the Sundays at One series in Port Townsend, Washington and was a featured reader in Auburn at the 2001 Super Bowl of Poetry.

Deconstructing Bedford Falls

Language is like Jimmy Stewart, if
you take my meaning: see him
play the stay-at-home who
feels the itch but never
gets away. He's lost
that sense of self that comes of being
hero in the hero's tale.

Duty ate him up and shat him out:
the Building and Loan, old Potter's Bank,
the Town, the Crash, the War.
See property is theft, the theft of self:
my house, my job, my mind, my hands, my feet.
What's left for me to be behind this matrix of possession?
My birth. My Life. My death. MY my.

Trust Heaven! How it
intercedes as Hollywood
to see our hero home,
who's us.

It gets complex, this sleight of screen:
George found the crack in being:
That's imagination:
slipped into an absence:
Stepped beyond the cave:
From which Platonic Lookout:
The Abode of unborn souls:
He framed life as never after so unhappily:
Being is a wink like an electron:
Nowhere is our other home for Now.

Aaaand
there's less:
from nowhere comes your paradox.
It lets our Jimmy/George desire what he possesses,
need what he doesn't lack.
Satiety just whets his appetite.
Sick of home he's homesick still in town.

Your language does that:
puts your absence all around your heart,
pictures continuity in blinks, like calculus,
where continuity an sich would be a blur,
and, telling its own story,
lets you catch my drift.

Now, here's the word from Hollywood.
Kids, don't try this at home.
Leave it to Jimmy Stewart.
He knows what he's doing.