When he was young, his limbs were sticks,
his fingers twigs, an elastic bark that bent
and bled stardust. His heart was an over
ripe plum, the older kids wanted to smash
it with boot heels, to hear the greenery crackle.
There's a gun in the glove box.
His stepfather made him rake apples down the hill,
that tart aroma clung to his skin like sap,
hornets buzzing like drunks in the perfume.
Instead of a sex talk, they watched pornography,
he listened to his parents fuck through the walls,
he touched himself and was ashamed.
There's a gun in the night stand.
Where was God while his mother stopped fighting?
He watched her face change to wax, felt the absence
before she was nothing, wanted that power
in his fingertips, to point and take away smiles,
to put holes in the thin veneer of sunlightcoated
darkness. His eyes were tunnels to nowhere.
There's a gun in the closet.
Work was a leaky pen in a blue shirt pocket,
was a series of paper bubbles waiting
to be colored in, was a shoelace untied and dragging
through someone else's piss, was a confessional
without a penance, a widening gap between
stepping stones, in an outward spiral leading up.
I'm the best at not being the best,
nothing is my reward,
I accept it from no one.
Nada y pues, nada y pues
These atoms swap themselves out
for new ones, in constant shift.
I'm nothing, but a ripple in your brain
slowly diluting into your own reflection.
Nada y pues
My shadow writes better poems,
he is the poet laureate of nothing,
nominated by the dead leaves
slowly ground into dirt
by feet and wind and time,
he reads them to the stars,
but they don't listen.
Nada
If I blink, I am dead,
dissolving into shadows and space,
my molecules absorbed and made new,
vibrating out into another poet's eyes,
waiting for him to blink
as he writes about meaning
1
Silence is the eggshell of morning, waiting to be cracked by the first bird's beak, that shrill shriek of song that penetrates the wall of dreams and lets loose those virginal beams of light through the blinds, turning black eyelids into the murky pink of dozing.
2
We make our eyes into coffin lids at night. We wait for dreams to fill us with light like projectors that remove the fear of death. In our beds, our minds could be severed from our bodies, floating through the infinite with no explanation, no knowledge of bullets or smoke inhalation. Trust the walls. Trust the windows. Trust the secrets kept in the skulls of lovers.
3
More prayers should thank the medulla oblongata. A city of traffic cops and software engineers living inside neck vertebrae like a forgotten slave plantation worked around the clock. There's no such thing as sleep on the cellular level. Like a downtown detour, something is always under construction. Dreams are the anesthetic for the surgeons in ourselves, in our cells. Complications are natural causes.
Jay Sizemore writes poetry and short fiction out of necessity: his attention span is too short to write novels. Blame the internet. His work has appeared in numerous online and print publications. He never Googles himself. Though he has found a day job to be the enemy of imagination, poverty is the cruelest of muses. Born and raised in rural Kentucky, he now resides in Nashville, Tennessee with his wife and three cats.
del.icio.us
