I was trying to write like an adult.
I was at the end of something.
As I waited at my table by the window for the coffee,
I saw that the sirocco had deposited
a scrim of dust on the sill overnight,
and it was the dark red of powdered blood,
and like any of the others of my kind would have done,
In the past, I might have gone for a peace sign
or a smiley face or an ejaculating penis,
but today I scrawled my name in it
leaving my fingertip ferrous with desert.
It felt like stroking suede against the nap,
half illicit, the particulates milled by wind
and sieved by the distance
to the softness of ash or brick dust.
I had been adding and subtracting
sounds from my epic on the winds
that thread the known world,
but something like a real poem surfaced
in my letters edged with tiny drifts.
What I wanted in a small thing was some
principle, some vividness
that lived both in things small and things great.
A desert is red and the dust is red
that make it up were red.
It is the iron held within.
They share the rationale of blood.
The tone was off. But maybe
They understand the color of
Lucinda was filling my demitasse
and stopped to watch the man,
a partisan, standing in the square outside the window.
The red cap of all his tribe was too small for his head,
which wobbled like a balloon
At the nearer counter, Kestius, mad again,
stopped reciting his ode to prostitutes
and turned around to get a proper look.
I had been thinking how the coffee
pouring from the spout and stopping
My Death is standing outside the window,
carrying on his shoulder a leg of lamb
rolled in darkened butcher paper,
and pointing his cigarette at me.
How they massed in the streets for their Caesar,
that rapist, that racist, that fat narcissist
who found the crowd responded best to flattery
I do not believe in the imagined realm of perfectness,
where nothing ever changes, where everything simply is,
and which, according to Plato and Judeo-Christian philosophy,
is the true realm of nature; the sense experience,
the red dust, the coffee, the leg of lamb—merely illusory.
We have no reason to believe in the perfect circle.
We have no reason to believe justice exists.
There is the endless play of absence and presence.
Seasons. Tides. The moon.
I don’t believe my senses bring me fake news.
I stood up and accidentally knocked my notebooks off the table.
Long ago I noted the impossibility of imagining
a heaven that doesn’t bore us instantly
to death, and I don’t believe the human body
is really a luminous body of white light
that moves toward the larger light
On the odd occasion, I feel amazed to be alive,
though not often, to be honest, and not recently.
Last summer, when the weather optioned its menace,
his priests summoned those born feet first,
those afflicted with harelips.
I lived in a state of despair and rage, we all did.
I could not remember the last time the political
had come to bear on the personal
to such a large extent, and I grew up
how the world’s tallest man had saved a dolphin
or they’d designed a gun for women—
to be shot by women, not to shoot them.
Last week, after the purge,
Kestius stopped me in the toilets to tell me
how he’d sealed his major poems in earthen jars
and buried them at nightfall by the lilac in his garden.
The time is just too real, he said.
We are approaching the source, he said.
Don’t you detect its heat in the night air,
in the vividness beneath the skin,
how everything is frantic?
Now their leader was dead
and his supporters on fire and I stood,
at a loss, on the edge of their anger—
you have been there—watching the dark
itself too easily and flow away from me.
and when the girl ran up and spat
panic like a swarm of bees, I tried
on my papers and fell and hit my head
The flesh is not a vessel emptied out at death.
I had the evidence of my own parents.
The cork does not come out.
Black stuff bubbles from the lungs to your lips.
Why would anyone set aside deities born of this earth
that protect the place to privilege metaphysical
who do not have that relationship?
Sirocco. Mistral. Levante. Ostro.
as names exactly, not without
following the sighing in the eaves
or a rounding in the branches.
I was unsure what to do with those
sounds and such information,
unsure what to do with the inconstancy
Poetry had not been good for me.
It hardened me where I should have been
What is it anyway to say that one thing
is like another? I practice forms of accusation.
I came to as they were dousing me in lamp oil.
Kestius was howling like a dog and being held back.
The girl was going through my bag.
I watched My Death try and strike a match.
stormborns
yousharknotpass
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2087
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