truths about nature #4
A time will come
when truth will black out
for the last time
and I won’t know
what to tell you.
A Note.
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—Joe
romance
innumerable gerunds and gray light
in the
stoic room
where the two girls who met
at the minstrel show
remember how to
party down
transference
two old cornstalks
smelling the polish of pesticide.
a flood of souls
hanging over them:
windchimes.
born
I remember
how the mud caked
on the blue flakes
of spring,
how they called
me by my birth name,
which hadn’t been
my name
for a long time.
The dense weeds
and crisp sage
stood, the
oak tree held
something secret
within its
lazy trunk,
the fat clouds
spilled the remains
of the angelic drainpipe
onto us
as my brother held
my hand,
spying the new world
coming into motion.
My President is Black.
I’m pretty sure I believe in Africa.
Do you think it exists?
I hear about it on the news,
and in storybooks.
They say that the white rhino
is going extinct.
I feel sorry for her
when the sun gets twinkle hot,
the way it must get hot
in Africa.
I heard that the volunteers want to
circumcise all of the men in the villages
because they say it is safe this way,
because it will look nice.
Nice things,
nice waists,
no children with fucked up mouths,
no faces drawn crudely in the soft earth
or into the hearts of YouTube subscribers.
I know that these people cannot be holy
unless I really believe in them,
just like Sarah McLachlan does.
I wonder if
they can hear me when I listen
to Cities 97 and read Time Magazine.
My lips sip in the Times New Roman
and my nose scrunches in flux
with my gaping jaw.
“It is all too much for me,”
I say.
So I click the “X” on the window,
give it a little mourning,
shed a tear.
Shed a tear, and think about other things,
keep clicking
until the world goes away.
butane seeps through
beads of biology
dripping down the
53 bus
my eyes sip them in
under a cummy sun
a wrinkled fit of red
butane
her airy kneecaps
are dungeons
in the well-lit hallway
of middlebrook hall
as i quickly learn
what desire is
A Prelude.
You wouldn’t be able to guess it, but this happened close by. It all collapsed down by the orchard, thick with cicadas and whining colors. Down by the orchard, where the fat mosquitoes plagued the local townsfolk, where the young bluejays danced or murdered other birds, where Sarah met me, where the pollen floated in ambivalence, atrophying alongside the lackadaisical (maybe stoned) grin of June. The most important thing for you to know is that the sun refused to spit light onto the orchard only once that season. On that day, nothing in particular occurred, but if you had been there, you would have known. Something was waiting in the fabric of that overcast sky. Most everyone could smell it, could sense it puncturing the humidity. And as if we had been duped by God, nothing came to give us a reckoning, at least not on that day. If our minds had been able to wrap themselves around what was really coming—we would have covered our lips with our right hand, plugged our noses with the left and cut the oxygen off from our lungs. But it’s all been long past by now, all that’s left are derivatives and the remnants of Niedermayer’s rosebushes. I hear that a new peep show is crawling into town though; might give us some entertainment. Maybe they’ll set up right over where the trouble came, or perhaps their equipment’ll rest on the train tracks just out of sight. All I know is that I could use some fresh milk to wipe away the dustpan of summer, to replenish the guts I spewed out, to resurrect the misplaced time—that’s all I can stomach these days.
I found a nest of newborn robins,
watched them pick at the scabbed fingers of the trees.
I was hazy from the Benzedrine;
my eyes speckled across the urban morning.
Pretty sure there was something I was forgetting,
saw the smoke signals rising from back east,
glazed my teeth with saliva and groaned my way
out of the leaves.
Figured the sun wasn’t coming any faster,
cause the jonesy kids’ll stay washed down
in the downers; uptown kids’ll spit spores through
the uppers, and let me tell you a secret, hope
you don’t repeat it:
the robins aren’t robins at all,
they’re just the remnants of the tweekers.
