Someone in a white coat spots your dick,
so the world thinks you're gendered male,
which leads to you dressed in blue
and ends in a bang on a Baghdad street
that you don't hear before it hits you,
and create something mystical out of this mud
Dude says, “somebody just shot me in the head!
I can’t pay attention to that! YOU pay attention to that!”
So I crawl 150 feet to the next gas station
The last time I heard the word redemption was from a guy who then dropped a Springsteen impression in the Best Buy parking lot. Beyond, goldenrod, high tension wires. Vistas are temporarily unavailable.
We wanted to fire live ammunition.
We paid attention to the warning sighs,
the subliminal hisses in the midst
of concertos—indicators that some
of the electrodes had come loose again.
We have ceased to be
Ourselves
We go on being beings
Not selves or wholes
Wholes with holes in them
Turn up the voltage
and burn out the light bulbs.
Step off the pedestal
and conform to nothing.
He can, of course, murder his enemy’s
Children in their sleep, re-educate
Entire societies, round up all the passable
Women in a village to create a forced labor brothel.
He has an app that flounders me in dopples, in gangers. Hello! I do not wish to linger. I dream of revenge that rankles, of gongs bonging when the time is up. I have heard that you can download the app.
Whereas good mannerly pensive prehensile Pence
him go dog-diggety nosing up unpoliced spreads
of othern’s privates downward through dives
divoting him roughs whilst lowering the rank
receding arrears panic
when disruptions concealed
their lost awe
to abdominal radar
There was an America
of red brick with limestone trim.
It was small, overcrowded,
and stood, in upper New York Bay,
at the edge of that other vast America.
In this Paris neighborhood
I read a book on The Resistance
to strengthen my poor French.
As I close the book the sun starts to set
Beneath soft skies and damp wrapped mountains
old men now bundled in earth against this cold
are fading memories of their war
like sepia photographs lost in attics
Unlikely Stories turned 20 years old on July 1, 2018. The 20th Anniversary Issue was released on July 4, 2018 and included more than a hundred authors and artists.
To set the process in motion I decide, arbitrarily, to use the three lines on page 62 as a post-snippet. Then, I begin at the bottom of page 61 and, working my way up to the title, arrive at the following poem:
The season of leaving arrives and we forge makeshift vows and conjure ceremonies out of smoke and flowers in a tiny cabin. Why, always, this shack stacked with dead wood upon dead wood?
But she was only shadows for
relic, vined up the lattice
work of astral rise. Drawing
air to the beds of her form
turning through another room,
Which is why I’ve kept my secret cold. Blank. Unforgiving. When I’m out walking it calls to me. Sounding high and strained. As if a string instrument gone out of tune. Something to reach toward. Frayed yet determined. It eats to my bone working its way beyond.
Sister says it’s redhead Judas
she can place it in the Holy Word
Sheriff leans from the passenger side
says it’s gamblers playing side bets
even the levee’s black & blue
the river whittles every stick
collapses lax relents
its trip out to sea
A flower born of a passing goose on
the verge of an unfinished sky
never hesitates to become a memory
of an insane supermarket cashier.
we burst forward like lightning,
prepared to claim our destiny
what we tasted, we wanted
without swallowing salt
Occasionally when discussing
great American novels, the walls
shook. Ravines were blasted
for more rocks to crush into powder.
You have 3 minutes.
You have to pick
3 minutes 3 minutes 3 minutes
to live over and over until they wake you—
‘Who you votin’ for, Ray?’
The constant refrain makes his glasses slip
however often he pushes them up his inherited nose.
‘Ain’t votin’ for no damn body.’
His Purple Haze became my breath, my flesh.
Star Spangled Banner sizzled —
igniting the world with flames
from his guitar. Jimi flipped the Strat
over, reversed the strings—
The great hall is ornate,
unpeopled, terribly hushed.
Hand holds an unshelved book that
won’t open. One after
another, books that won’t open.
Even after death.
I wear the t-shirt around the house.
The heathens sing.
About my unbuttoned blouse.
He couldn’t say that he
Couldn’t say that he couldn’t
Wish for a kinder father.
What could he say, faced
With those sorts of choices?
Swilled on Labor Day at Lake Havasu
With body bags more plentiful than
boats
Drifting from motel to motel
I have buried men like gods
dressed in the rags of the state,
my fiery way
in the throat of things to come,
beautiful women robbed
of beauty and sense,
O sand O silk O galactic black wild—she dances naked, breathless, on the web-spread surfaces of Zodiacal light.
O exposed bruises, O love doubled into madness, madness into self murder
flood of sunlight bouncing off dust particles, ions in the coronal plasma, forbidden spectral emission lines—
To speak in parable, the
most vintage smoking
paraphrenalia is super light
& packable because it lets
you leave the poles behind.
When we think back on it, we’ll call it “the end times”
and remember the strongmen tying knots in their thick ropes
just before they used them for saving those in the crevasses.
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