Demolition
hey have dismantled
The Third Avenue El;
It’s still the same though,
They haven’t removed
Those torn-down men.
-bob kaufman
Waste My Life
sleep, boredom, gossip, cruelty
imaginary feuds and small resentments
various, complex plans that amount to nothing
at some point, every poet has to admit art is just a distraction from the boredom of life
every morning I get dressed
and I walk past the road outside the Salvation Army
overflowing with toys and clothes and plastic crap
I think they probably deserve it for being so explicitly homophobic in their core organizational values
I work all day in a bookshop
each night when I come home
it’s dark, and the rain is falling
covering the world in black diamonds
some days I feel so deep inside my life I don’t think I’ll ever get out again
I never read the Russians but I have read most of the Babysitters Club
I can’t remember the meaning of poetry
other than it’s a broken telephone
with which to call the dead
and tell them a joke
life is great
it’s like being given a rare and historically significant flute
and using it to beat a harmless old man to death with
I used to think the more something hurt, the more meaningful it was
but I never learned anything useful from pain
I just drank a bottle of wine and tried to fall asleep
when you’re unhappy you can’t think
pain is just boredom with the stars turned up
there’s not much I like in this world
I’m always walking away too early in a conversation and having to yell apologetically back over my shoulder
I don’t think good art comes from happiness either
but who said good art was the point
-hera Lindsay bird
a graveyard song for an animal sanctuary
When the wells dry up, my mother is taken
to search for extraterrestrials in the desert.
The location, like her real age,
is undisclosed. No fake Prada
stores, no high-
altitude balloon
conspiracies & no reception. The call, in a sense,
ends the moment I try to claim the apple
never fell, never fell at all, from either tree. Aba asserts:
breathe & then warns me she doesn’t like the word alien.
I know this well enough, how my mother knows
well enough, that deserts are not prophecy. Or
a graveyard song for an animal
sanctuary, somewhere far-off,
founded on second-guessing.
Like it ever mattered which
side of a fence or war-
head to the last rhino
left, when he’s blessed with two armed
guards to protect him from everything
but thirst. Over static, I hiss it’s too late to save
face. What they must think of you, when your best
technosignatures are smog, sulfur dioxide, stampedes
in open-air stadiums. Is this how you’re found
amid the darkness? Is it enough?
Would you not exist if you lived
unseen? While my mother rises & falls into sky,
I repeat how humans have changed the destiny
of this planet. Aba cries out: breathe.
He mistakes this for atonement
& fires back:
how wrong
the foundations here, like those
in supersymmetry, are stacked.
How you built your wells & havens
so inaccurately that your ultimate
capability is never being proven
wrong. I won’t ask for forgiveness
when Aba searches for his place,
again, among you. Was it enough
to believe the apple
would never rot from a lack
of rigor. When did you stop asking
for the math? & when the rhino turns
into a golden calf,
what will tarnish
& unearth your base
metals? What will you
do when your alloys
sour & gasp?
I hold my breath. I trap
his wrath. The heart continues
to track. Aba falls silent when I switch
off every tap & highway, render complete
darkness. The last of you continue
to gaze up, for no reason
you will recall. You shiver & open
mouths wide, for what was precious
& pure. & I
no longer pretend
that I ever breathed
any part of it,
this future you pooled
together, the way a single drop
of water relies on surface
tension. I won’t ask forgiveness
when giving away exact coordinates
& next destinations. Don’t be afraid.
On the surface, we aren’t unlike one
& the same. It’s just you are the reason
you’re already gone.
& I’m here to stay.
Rosebud Ben-Oni Wrestling with Surface Tension
la raza cósmica
Once we were chopping cotton
in the fields of Jesus Maria Ranch. All around us the woods.
Quelite towered above me, choking the stubby cotton that had
outlived the deer’s teeth.
I swung el azad6n hard. EI quelite barely shook, showered nettles on my arms and face. When I
heard the rattle the world froze.
I barely felt its fangs .. Boot got all
the venom. My mother came shrieking, swinging her hoe high,
cutting the earth, the writhing body ..
I stood still, the sun beat down.
Afterwards I smelled where fear had been:. back of neck” under
arms, between my Iegs;. I felt its heat slide down my body. I
swallowed the rock it had hardened into.
When Mama had gone down the
row and was out of sight, I took out my pocketknife.l made an X
over each prick. My body followed the blood, fell onto the soft
ground .. I put my mouth over the red and sucked and spit between
the rows of cotton.
I picked up the pieces, placed
them ,end on end. Culebra de cascabel. I counted the rattlers:
twelve .. It would shed no more. I buried the pieces between the
rows of cotton.
That night I watched the window sill, watched the moon dry the blood on the tail, dreamed
rattler fangs filled my mouth, scales covered my body. In the
morning I saw through snake ,eyes, felt snake blood coarse
through my body. The serpent, mi tono, my animal counterpart. I
was immune to its venom. Forever immune.
Connoisseur of chaos
After all the pretty contrast of life and death
Proves that these opposite things partake of one,
At least that was the theory, when bishops’ books
Resolve the world. We cannot go back to that.
The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,
If one may say so. And yet relation appears,
A small relation expanding like the shade
Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of a hill.
cut from https://sibila.com.br/poetry-essays/connoisseur-of-the-chaosa-dialogue-between-two-giants/2689
an extraordinarily appropriate tone in which to speak of this life
scroll down this linked page to see https://www.academia.edu/11522988/Memoires_Guy_Debord_and_Asger_Jorn_English_Facsimile_
to detonate the vacuumed living quarters of all the bourgeoisies on earth
—to fly deep
—to journey through the Steppe
—to triumph over culture
—to fall high
—to serenade barbaric people
—to defy civilized man
cuts from Ljubomir Micić’s airplane without an engine
Jeannette Ehlers Whip It Good
How to Let Go of the World
When I walk into the street it’s almost as if it’ll last: Smudge of a cooked orange pressed into the sky. The cars follow all their old lineages back and forth from shifts; meanwhile, three teenagers pile rollicking onto the sidewalk.
I don’t know how to do it: hold their faces in my hands and tell them what’s waiting. How to teach any of us to follow this song, into what dark.
: : :
One evening, I turned a corner and panicked at a sudden flash in my rearview, teeth chattering into my highest throat. Every nerve prepared for the acrid drip of cop talk until I realized: it was no cruiser. It was the sky. The sky, shocked with dying.