Mine resists being made to do. No doctors – I will palpate my own internal Oregon(s), a fontanel there or something other than the hard lesson of getting by with less. Nothing like a cheap applause for fewer collateral damages! And refusing to breezily whom my way to the tippy-top of the totem of dog-whistle-blowers, address thee bag-o-bones or none-the-less. Or anything like its opposite. Digressing analysis and strictly duress: I point, I demand, I j'accuse. Shall I say reign instead of your more familiar name, dear President. No permanent structures (but of course you know the infra-) in the blueprints, the new new paradigm same as the old old. That's why the switcheroo, that's why the movement from tablets to slates to notepads to ticker-tape to floppy to diskette to hard-drive to thumbs to web-logs to feeds live-streaming and back again to the inevitable and distraction of tablets.
Fuck ideas, and fuck all things. I want to be a thing alone without ideas, goddammit. Let me eat a cherry abstraction with a chocolate dollop of concrete atop. Let me become an Emperor of Ice; let me become the lone Legislator of the Long Night. Out there, not here — that's where the war comes from. Don't you read the news. Open wide, and stay inside. We are the builders. We are the savers. We are the reason not to need a new world order. We've taken care. We've left none left not unspared. I was sorry before I wasn't them, but now am sorry I always am. We, we, we, all the way come, and all the way gone. Is there nothing left we've left unspared.
At the north there is a book in the shape of an old ruined landmark. Their letter there is a landscape. The letter there is a potion. Are you writing. This treebark heals wounds. This leaf turns over the day into night. This grass recalls a past. This moss rescinds the possible. This flower petal restores vision, and this one sight. There is a cure for everything, but not all at once. These herbs amplify sensation if chewed, but numb when taken in a tea. And what a record of the powders of the dead provides is no end to war. There is a curse for every cured thing. Are you writing. Don't write this down. The letter is a poison. Who are you reading for, them or us. At the north there is a lowering place that sinks into death to wake it.
Jacob A. Bennett lives and works in Philadelphia, where he teaches writing, poetry, and literature courses to undergrads of variable engagement and enthusiasm. The fact that the deck in the backyard has no stairs, more than one year on, means no one else uses it—he likes that. Links to CV, other poems, and various well-intentioned screeds published at antigloss.wordpress.com.
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