The Land of the Brave - David Joseph Ostrowski - day 27
going well for you, is it, in the land of the brave?
i sat through funerals and festivals and haircuts and elevator rides,
and nothing of value happened and i don’t think i was all that blessed.
i never jumped ship, and perhaps i’m not all that better for it.
devise you your stunted riddles, your handmade truths.
perform you your miracles—there are no mindful eyes watching.
i slopped through the mud on my way to stealth hell,
and dripped through the roof like a leak in the living room.
television glass and static touch for the rangers and airpilots,
and snickers bars and carports for the rest of us.
how old the stout city of concocted languishing nuances;
how cold and blisteringly feverish the orange sun
convalescing with her ocean crash and bow-backed mountain ranges?
on the ode and after the smart kindness.
the world drinks its syphillic water.
the world bounds and rebounds.
the world doesn’t need this
land of the brave—it ensures it.
howling in the distance, a man explains, “we are in a relationship.”
by no greater good than his own, the man sighs and lays his head down for nap.
elsewhere in same brave land, random brown man
outside a rite aid begs a passerby for money.
when turned down, brown man ridicules passerby for stealing.
he is called a name. he is right in his accusation.
again, same land, different place on that same land—
a woman with gnarly fingers coughs on the subway, craning neck,
bathless and above water. she is gotten away from
by any and all those that perceive her like a damned spot out.
i can conceive of greater things than to be forced buried
by whatever dark amniotic monster is soon to be birthed
from this bloodsoaked, crisscrossed, stolen land.
way out across my body from you is the other end
of the thick and bad bed. we sleep tangled and shoelaced—
imperfect and perfect, complete and incomplete.
there are other countries, other lands. they listen in; they don’t.
there are movies at play, radio dramas, still lifes.
on and on its rivers they go, braving their way, getting in the way of mine.
the strangling, struggling, strawman arguments of it;
and then the normal and haphazard and great goodness god glory of it.
the fascism gets contained in the puttering stuttering heart of it.
it doesn’t brave anything. it doesn’t compare.
it contains multitudes. it will never amount to shit.
the land gayly responds to its own silly, small-minded norms.
there are valleys composing soliloquies for me; for you.
there’s nothing to say. i can’t consume fast enough
to keep up with these bodies of water. i can’t live weakly enough
to thrive in this heap of hay fever and boom box problem.
the taxes are sky high. brave me this constant that turns
its stereo too loud, too boom, too on that no one can care,
no one can think, no one can listen. maybe the song rings true
the same way that the evidence of what are things has died
in an everlasting and neverending way. the same way
that the soon and sad things are harder to bury, harder
to let go off. the brave land is sloughing off its weird skin.
it will double over and go back again. it gets dirt in its hair.
it tumbles. it tricks. it fools. it divebombs.
the land and its cities have been laid out to pasture
by those forced to give labor to it, to birth it till it comes.
next time i see you we’ll both be laid up together,
trembling our breaths together, sloshing our sweat together.
next time we’ll have to have more of that stuff—the kind
you don’t know what to do with; i’ll show you what the fuck to do with it.
