#here bullet

[bostonpoetryslam]

Let me lie here and dream of a better life. Let what beauty there is be lifted up and given to the greater world as I listen to the mouths of termites eating of the earth, their bodies drumming a rhythm in the soil, undaunted in their blindness, by the millions raising a skylined architecture the blood moon must recognize with light. Let me stay here with these birds and listen to their rough songs.

Brian Turner, “Mihrab,” from Here, Bullet

[a-return-to-dust]

[supplyship]

If a body is what you want,

then here is bone and gristle and flesh.

Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,

the aorta’s opened valves, the leap

thought makes at the synaptic gap.

Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,

that inexorable flight, that insane puncture

into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish

what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,

here is where I complete the word you bring

hissing through the air, here is where I moan

the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering

my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have

inside of me, each twist of the round

spun deeper, because here, Bullet,

here is where the world ends, every time.

Here, Bullet

By Brian Turner

[iamthetulip]

from "Gilgamesh, in Fossil Relief"

History is a cloudy mirror made of dirt and bone and ruin. And love? Loss? These are the questions we must answer by war and famine and pestilence, and again by touch and kiss, because each age must learn This is the path of sun's journey by night.

-Brian Turner, from Here, Bullet

[iamthetulip]

from "Dreams from the Malaria Pills (Turner)

This time it's beautiful. He's in the kelp beds somewhere off the California coast, floating where green leaves touch the sun, as if he's disentangled from thought itself, as if the mind has come this far, up from the depths to release him to the crests and shallows drifting wave by wave back to shore.

-Brian Turner, from Here, Bullet

[iamthetulip]

You will hear the RPG coming for you. Not so the roadside bomb.

from "What Every Soldier Should Know," Here, Bullet by Brian Turner

[hush-syrup]

Here... here is where the world ends, every time.

From Here, Bullet by Brian Turner

[hush-syrup]

If a body is what you want, then here is bone and gristle and flesh. Here is the clavicle-snapped wish, the aorta’s opened valves, the leap thought makes at the synaptic gap. Here is the adrenaline rush you crave, that inexorable flight, that insane puncture into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish what you’ve started.

From Here, Bullet by Brian Turner