a pupa grown so tall.
shaking out his legs, compression
of intention into “okay”.
and up, sends his crown
through the crystal ceiling.
like the clouds are liquidating
their almost angels. blood and water.
brings down the sky, shower
of teeth. an unexpected gomorrah.
It’s probably better you never called me back -
I don’t mean to bring you down,
but I probably will.
Lazy ideas wander throughout my brain:
I drink water from piles of tires in the playground,
mosquitoes hatch in the tummy and buzz around a few seconds.
I feel sorry for them
I feel sorry for everyone
so I say I am sorry
so I sing I am sorry
then they turn down my volume.
Just got a job,
but still broke as before
but now with less time.
I need to do more wrong things
since the wrong plans are the
only plans which ever work out.
People walk away when I speak
so I might as well shout,
towns are made for cars now
so these legs are unsure of themselves.
It takes so long to get anywhere -
might as well lie down
and let hunger eat itself.
(let hunger eat my legs
let hunger eat my arms
let hunger eat my head
and the skull inside
the brain the eyes the jaw the lips
hunger will eat my body
and when this body is gone
hunger will eat my bed
hunger will eat my room
hunger will never stop
until a baby cries
then it might stop)
I woke up in a hospital
I thought I saw animals all around me
bears, giraffes, transparent but alive.
I blinked and heard gunfire downstairs.
Then you found me and fed me some water,
it is good you never called me back -
I don’t mean to bring you down,
but I probably will anyway.
Hanging out by the water fountain
watching ants pour out of the sidewalk
I look up and all of a sudden
I can see into the sun and
I see particles of light
not yet exposed to
our contagious darkness
down here.
Were you in the garage that summer—
playing rockabilly blues
and rockaway my sorrow honey with a sledgehammer?
you—in that dirty, yellow tank top,
the once white fabric holding in
the bronzed body caked in grit and dust.
And was it her—that lovely skinny thing—
who kissed your neck, her flowing brown hair
falling down around her? (And how she’d look
when it was raining—hands in pockets,
looking up to God for it was spring
and indeed time for resurrection.)
And what about those times when
she threw off all her clothes and danced
naked and wild and howling?
Do you remember how together you’d lie at night
in the back of a pick-up
parked exactly half-way between here and
Pueblo? And what of that one particular instant
when she looked at you
as if she wanted to scream, but she
swallowed and held it in and you swallowed
and asked nothing and so
nothing was said until dawn?
This—this existence of too much sun
and not enough drugs, food, sex
(what was it that was lacking?)—
this existence of the suntanned pauper king
and his 6 string pawn shop guitar,
this existence spent dwelling,
understanding the notion of sharing bodies—
it was not enough for any of us
and so we packed cardboard boxes,
dreamt of other horizons,
and dared to believe that what we didn’t need
we would leave behind.
There are seven minds beneath your
outstretched skin,
rapturous drum,
stretched
genital
blank
doomed for mechanization
musical,
torrential
and dying;
separate and ghostly perditions,
hallways of image and vastness-
both bright and terrible.
yours and mine own biological artifice
sees son-cast shadows that
eat imagination by the measure,
grind-and-tumble rapturous laughter,
jumps, so bacchic for the
crackling spaces in between.
When god sank in my heart
to sleep awhile, as if
a brother’d come to stay,
in the rhythm he came walking,
stealing from his passage in the desert,
he floated towards
the whole world’s Israel.
And god became a total heart
(that is the absolute perfection!)
And hung upon a tree until
the senses also died,
And born of womb and
Palestine’s abstractions,
the dying god who walked
towards the center of the earth
became the cataclysmic flame
and burnt out all the darkness.
see a brother’s name
writ in red chalk, then
a brother’s name,
exumed from foreign soil.
their numbered years next-
a sloppy list
on a cold sidewalk
that lines the border
between private enterprise
and public agony
i don’t see anyone praying
these lightly chalked epitaphs.
the snow will bury them
again tonight, the cold
will separate powder from cement,
offering up dust
to reverberating emptiness
melt water has never learned of letters,
will carry these names
into a deeper gutter
black foal
it’s righteous priapism, refraction
through cut glass. kindness
is another work I can only guess at.
spells the robbery, smoke
from the dog kilns. oh – there’s love.
somewhere, this universe too large
for a thing to be absent. the truth
has it’s opposite; he’s riding hard
on a black/buckling foal, through the language.
swollen heart, fat with hatred – not discipline.
-garrett dawson