"yawning @ the apocalypse," "woke up dead," and "deported oarsman"
yawning @ the apocalypse
good morning shrapnel
wipe the eyes from your shame
shit save shower
it’s almost of the hour
gearing up for another long torture
rising to despise the east
kill em all like breakfast
syrup savored and runny yolks
of the holy land yokes
constrain even the new world
orders we just a following
commercials and toy imperators
at the twitter helm
the money masons mortaring
a divisive world without
justice equal rights or peace
a mere america
daily farce of the news feed
who’s missing inaction
don’t sneeze at
the supermarket in your pocket
our updates and selfies are
all a crass approximation of living
involuntary evolution extinction reflex
woke up dead
larva your skull upon the pillow
alone a centerpiece or offering
day past the point of asking
any forgiveness
the sleepless regrets rewind
for the next night’s screening
slowly weaning my body
from its obituary tremors
into the wake of day dealt off the bottom
doesn’t need to cheat just wait you out
so you lie polish and set out all the lies
yours and theirs for all hours of nights
and when sleep could touch your eyes
build its buttresses to lift your secretions
or sift them it would be welcomed
instead we outwash and toss
like applause for the impossible
illusion’s mulligans can be even crueler
than the deals made out of degrees
but what’s undone is how we treat
the cart before the hearse
in favor of ourselves how we steal
cheap moments for even briefer sustenance
how we use faith to degrade
faith and make hope hapless
compared to every fear uttered
I’m the dead spoil laid out before you
please spare me your tips and blessings
I have become a vagabond of dawns
deported oarsman
hell hoarding money scores
bottlenecked and automated
brake for the piranha land
unfortunate force field of warlords
and jihadi-stations maelstroms
refugees hail countries immediately
cordless borders mortared
brick by encrypted brick
spanglish isn't sexy anymore or is it?
plebeians to possibilities and universal disease
the first version of justice still enacted
surveillance for surveillance
prop for prop
hack for hack
the future ain’t never coming back
a fragmented figment of zero nonsense
the hillbilly beacon of stability
and reverent progress pilfering
primarily by the pilgrims
under whose policies we remain orphans
and why should we not damn our withering to spring
and why should we not feel the fluster further
sensitize our oppression and fortunes
to understudies of undertakers and why should we not care
when they don't upstage us and why should we not fight in the streets
for the same fucking thing everyone fights in the streets for
then why should we not exist and exist and think not of not freely thinking
then why should we not believe the sharks and the remoras are breeding as well as the vultures lions and ghazals and its us them and the whole fucking periodic table bleeding or drawing blood or fleeing to attack our prey another livelong eternity which extinction still strikes as the most bearable and dignified fate even after all the beauty of earth blows into vacant freezing space like the goodbye kiss it was always meant to erase
Vincent A. Cellucci wrote Absence Like Sun (Lavender Ink) and An Easy Place / To Die (CityLit Press). He edited Fuck Poems an exceptional anthology (Lavender Ink). He has three collaborative titles: come back river (Finishing Line Press), Bengali-English translation collaborations with Debangana Banerjee, and with Christopher Shipman ~getting away with everything and _a ship on the line (both from Unlikely Books). Vincent performed “Diamonds in Dystopia,” an interactive poetry web app at SXSW in 2017, and the poem was anthologized in Best American Experimental Writing 2018. After writing and living it up in Louisiana for 18 carnivals, he moved to the Netherlands to experience sinking some place new. He haunts the TU Delft Library.