Tag: new poetry
I have only ever left this planet once
in a billow of thistles
after snorting meth amphetamine
in an abandoned record store
in Hollywood, birds settling
into the window sills
I want to live long enough to outlive my mother
so she never learns of the needles hidden throughout my apartment
the way she once hid money from herself
for times when she didn’t work enough
and I pray if she ever learns
When the song said that even the sun sets on paradise
I think of you and my body breaks into mist—dear friend—
who once laughed and wept I remember sitting in the next room
hearing the low slow note of your exhale like an oboe’s mumble
Notes on Seroconversion
Then & only then was it made clear: I was to be no different than the rest stepping out to toke menthols at the curb, standing tall & slack-jawed as we joked about our aging forms—this fresh stretch mark, that odd crash course—did you know there was more than one way to snake a drain? to sump a pump? to earn one’s crust?—eventually snuffing the butts to reenter the song & hall with an edged finesse, as seen in certain sub-sects of eels—the swarm of us, looking just as lithe & cosmopolitan beneath the stroboscopic lights; fueled by syrup & ice & salt on the rim & in these stolen seconds, when the self-loathing lowers its pitch, who wouldn’t be convinced they could exist: bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, not subject to bad trips or high rent or low T cell counts or tear gas or squalor— who wouldn’t be convinced, utterly convinced, to live might always feel
Feedback
Because what isn’t
Fed back? A time and place
For everything, my mother said,
But everything is A time, a place,
If you know to trace.
I carry my own face
And my mother’s,
And my father’s
Graceless shape; Both are overlaid.
A boy, I tried to rail against
The sect of men Who pick up rage but fell
Among the ranks anyway.
A boy, I was made
Effective in a lowly way, a ditch
In which this country’s scat
Falls fat.
When you’ve seen the image
Become word, the word
Become image again, “In the beginning” seems A useless trope.
Don’t speak to me of ends.
I’ve seen the legislated ditch
In which you’ve dropped
The dispossessed and young, hoping
We’d choke on our own
Mass. Why would you think that
Would last? Grown, we’ve come
Into our own, we’ve seen it all
Must be overthrown—
We, the people, the rank, the poor Muscled things
The ditch spits back.
“My idea of abstraction is white lightning”
Jack Whitten
Halfway between Gonyon and Ophelia imminent splendor. It doesn’t matter what I don’t know.
Clouds creating a blue fissure in the sky, whose grammar whose sadness hurries forth?
I want to speak to order: soybeans, corn, wheat rows browned to torpor.
Mercy. Protozoan, water-shorn, hotly I listen in the pines for my green name. Whoever can
stop reasoning, stop. Is it too much to ask tobe remade I who’ve just begun?
Adagio of light, copper-hued diadem
hanging on twilight’s hem, Virginia sun— I’m yet released from the
sharp language of being: make me anotherby morning lest I stay
in this vestibule wholly unmade