ELSEWHERE
How long a citizen of that white silence
was I, did I know enough not to name
all things winter, even my own skin,
even the edge of the water, its strangeness,
its molecular tongue, all grief
added to it, all the words I knew,
the ones sewn into my pockets like warding,
how long did I sleep in that life
of night, what did I guard
with my breath while my bones leeched away,
with the salting of love
everything that morning
seemed made of snow, statuaries of vapor,
and you at the center of it
reading about atoms,
about that which has no mass,
displaces nothing,
drifting through all this life and unlife,
to whom could I speak
like a stranger
and in what language
struggle to articulate
even this hour
filling up with the imprimatur of dust,
and when I dream
of my body perforated by starlight
reaching me like pale roots
through dark soil, what am I
except awake, except a name, except lost?
7 comments:
I call your bad poem...I wrote the following after J. Bell dared me to write the worst poem ever. How can we make it worse? Throw your darts, young Jedi.
The Worst Reverend Jim Ignatowski Impression Ever
Jeff Tweedy, Harvey Pekar, and the Bishop Desmond Tutu walk into a bar.
The bartender says, free drinks to whoever can do the best
Reverend Jim Ignatowski impression.
Tweedy looks up at the TV. There’s a commercial on: two young woman in an airy city loft sing the praises of a fat-free yogurt. The tall sexy black one says, it’s cum-on-my-face good. The white one, cute and waifish, says, no,
it’s reaming my creamy shit chute good.
Pekar draws an escape route on a napkin. There’s a place we can go,
he says, up in Canada, a city on a lake where they recycle everything
and the downtown looks like a subdivision.
I skip out the back with the Bishop Desmond Tutu. We jump in his cab. He drives us recklessly through the dark until daybreak, where we come upon
a clear, cold river. We will fish by hand, he says.
A school of yearling trout pucker the surface with tiny mouths too small to take our wiggling finger-bait. Then the brood stock arrive, striped, slow-finning through the shallows. They are genetic experiments, a cross
between trout and tiger, their hind legs are just starting to sprout
from either side of their anal fins, which are caked with blood.
I’m worried, I say. Desmond Tutu just smiles. This could be the worst Reverend Jim Ignatowski impression ever.
Wow, Paul. Thank you for this...
Paul--
Please forgive me...
Forgive you? For what?
this is something amazing
this is something amazing
Thank you, doubly.
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