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These forms and stanzas are loaded with ghosts, these lines and sentences are loaded with hooks. I open my mouth and feel pleased in the gluestick, and no apologies for the changes to the framework in the process, I’m a rebel … I’m a rebel and I bunny-hop, Deathstar, the works.
The perfumy air all around is not a dissonance. It does not taste like an elephant’s exhaust; it is murderless, a fountain of paint and I gulp it and adore it like a friend in a spasm. Willingly, I go to the window in the trees and undress crazily so you’ll touch me with your blueprints.
I like to breathe the breath of the fog, the swimming pool skateboarders, the jellyfish kite as it soars above the spruce, and the forklift lifting a birdhouse off my chest. I like to hear the cars’ awful honks, the hornets, the ice cream truck drivers. I like to feel shoved fundamentally off-kilter bursting like a balloon animal, at the volume of many amps, and the blood of my blood in the fiber-optic cables, the innocent infractions of a cool breeze’s movement a wide receiver’s dance in the end zone’s deep end. I like to smell the arugula leaves and the dried oregano leaves the onyx strewn beaches and hay bales of paint. I like to hear the ragdoll of moss in my voice, kicking up dust on a polka dot horizon. I like to press my lips to yours, to feel your arms engulf my form, and live in the letters’ eternal correspondence. I like to play among the shadows of eagles’ wings, shaking the trees with their weird silent engines. I like to feel alone in the crowd at a punk show, kicked in the back of the head in the pit with a Schlitz or an Old Style spilled down my shirt. I like to be owlish beneath the full moon and get up singing “Summer” to greet the morning sun, “Crescendo-ing and decrescendo-ed/All is quiet/Sun is tell-all/ And bleeding from the nose/Neighborhood explodes…”
What did you expect? That I would settle for a few unmuted meat scraps? Did you think the dark matter of the universe would be too much for me? Why are you even literate if you don't know how to undermine authority? Crane with me today, count with me the weeks in a year and I will show you how “Song of Myself” becomes “Canto a mi mismo” becomes “At Night I Sing My Heads to Sleep,” and so on. Then you will be able to make you own new song (there are billions of songs inside any/one you know), and you will recycle and appropriate, remix and collaborate, melt down and return. Your dead eyes won’t die anymore. The ghosts in your books will fuel your own. Neither will you see into the world using my lantern or wring the little pillows of bees from my hands. You will get to listen in every direction at once and your spirit thus inspirited will echo through the Universe, exactly like my spirit, yet totally different.
—Matt Hart, from "At Night I Sing My Heads to Sleep" (Isele Magazine, March 2022)
