Monday, March 28, 2022

the holy angel of blasphemy, upon arrival

 

not a poem but a

                painting

 

a certain day

 

sunlight, but

frost in the shadows

between houses

 

a man with a gun or a

child left

to drown in the bathtub

 

soft music on the radio

 

and was this the year you

filmed your best friend

raping some drunken, passed-out

teenage girl, or doesn’t that

help narrow it down?

 

was it the year of the last

unjust war or was it

maybe the start of the next one?

 

all of this pain &

laughter becomes a blur

and it’s not a painting but a

photograph i keep in

a forgotten desk drawer

dead white tree rising up from

its own reflection in

the center of a flooded field

 

blue sky

 

endless grace

 

the last of the snow on the

far sides of the hills and

the obvious knowledge that

here was never worth as

much as there

 

the thirty years i spend

waiting for you to reappear

 

the first flowers of spring

filigreed with crystals of ice

 

and powerlines at some point

strung between dull grey

poles, but no buildings

 

no signs of human machinery

 

the hum in my head that

passes for truth

when i close my eyes


Saturday, March 19, 2022

nembutal singalong

 


in the silence of

defeated houses

 

in the absence of rain

 

luminescent grey skies seen through

warped panes of glass, distorted

flight of birds, of falling angels, and

in the room of murdered children

there is always room for

one more tragedy

 

is always one more old man with the

DTs crawling through one more

overgrown and garbage-filled

back yard

 

can’t change the past and

can’t relive it and so we start to

look around for other options

 

dog on fire in a vacant lot

 

sound of teenage laughter

 

and it means something

of course

if you do nothing

 

small boy crying on the sidewalk and

all i have to offer him is a cup of blood

 

girlfriend’s stepfather tells you he’d

fuck her himself if he was

fifteen years younger

 

laughs and hands you a beer and

when the dog tries to run

someone shoots it with a .22

 

june becomes july

 

poison from the factories on the

other side of town turns the bones

of all the sleeping babies to dust

 

call it progress

 

wait for the punchline

 

the idea of freedom in a

nation of assholes

will always be a troubling thing






Friday, March 18, 2022

all of this and all of us and then whatever remains

 

and the priest is a man w/

the head of a crow and

the fields are full of corpses

 

the village is dust and its roads

are mud and inside a house built of blood

and shit is a woman who’s smothered

all three of her babies

 

on the other side of the desert

are the ruins of a city

 

beyond the city is an ocean on fire

 

how long are you willing to sail

to find a better country?





Monday, March 14, 2022

and it’s not the here and now that brings me down

 


and i told him i didn’t

think we could both be dead at the

same time, and he disagreed

 

turned the radio up loud, told me

he could never get enough of the stones

 

told me his little sister

was in love with me

 

sais if you ever touch her i’ll

cut your nuts off, and so i asked what he

thought about the mole on the inside

of her left thigh

 

i smiled at the sound of

the first broken bone

 

it was already ten years into

a future that

only one of us would live to see