Two Poems

 
Bellicose, Varicose Brains

-For Ashby Logan Hill
-To be read to “Beautiful but Stupid”
by Peter Brötzman

***

Rock and rail, rambler,
randomly reticent and rageful.
Wriggle your ringfinger. Forget there’s no ripcord.
Remember
rapture ruins everything,
ruptures the aorta, sorta,
severs certainty, certainly
along with your severance and any remaining leverage.
I’d wager
with a waiver
your circle of trust is no board of trustees,
the cavity calling the canker sore a Karen
the eyesore swearing at the onlooker,
swearing they’ll require surgery or serendipity
post-staring contest.
The devolution of the revolution was televangelized

so pack your bags, prisoner,
you’re going nowhere.
You’ll be begging for solitary once
the weather takes a lurch for the pyre.
Your soul is but a sigh in the firestorm.
Sure,
your body is “a temple,”
one big unpopped pimple,
the western cerebral hemisphere a forklift,
the storeroom stacked with whimpers.
Resistance is erectile dysfunction.
The labyrinth redundant.
They run it by their lawyers and get back to us
never.
We break fast into the nightlight.
We breakfast at Whiffany’s in Warsaw,
open like a yawn until dawn.
We sift through corner store lore,
heart-to-heart failures and restarts and
astrological fart charts,
pilfering shopping carts at Walmart for modern art.
The poor man thrives on air and the illusory.
I repeat this with some authority because
I am him; you are me.

Hell, we’re all churchgoers here,
chock-full of unanswered prayers,
never the bride, always the bridesmaid-ogler,
gadgetry at the pageantry,
a busted trinket at an estate sale,
hardly a petroglyph
smirking forever more below the backfill
at the county dump.




FLACCID IS THE MONUMENT ON THE NIGHT OF THE WOEBEGONE:
SONNETS, SOMEWHAT
-To Shane

1.
There is a big conversation right now and
I, for one, refuse to (not) have it anymore.
Blow into your palm as if the dust of time swirls out.
Speak the following two sentences simultaneously:
It will matter. It will matter not at all.
One is longer than the other. Make a list:
you’re an asshole, my sadness, our violentest thoughts.
I’m talking unraised fist. Blunt steeple. Blunts. Cracked
stalagmite, stump. Clarinets with their veins and valves.
Hell, the whole wind section licked precisely and blown,
blaring out. I need my hands trapped under me to sleep.
I obsess on it daily like a deity or house plant.
Isn’t what’s wrong with the world a man in a dark room
of blinking buttons clutching his joystick?

2.
In a gymnasium in a dream last night
my ex-wife pegged me in the face with a dodgeball.
My other ex-wives and next wives applauded from the bleachers.
Then came down one by one to peg me more.
It was glorious. All their favorite places were celestial.
When they came: ribbons. A disco ball spun.
All the angels of heaven and hell hummed
along with the vibrators vibrating in
solidarity in dresser drawers across the land.
I came the puff of confetti dirtying in the corner.
I hugged my knees to my chest beside it
muttering, I’m gentle, I’m handsome,
I’m a leader, over and over until she asked,
were you gonna clean that up?

3.
Maybe some silliness to cure our ills,
Mr. Potato Head. In the end we all drop trou
and moon the coroner; moons pocked like some
greasy adolescent on which the sun, arrogant elder,
never shines again. It takes years to master
insouciance and when you do, you're dead.
You’re your dad. One generation masters
-isms and -phobias and the next barricades
the doors to redemption. One generation
straps themselves to the tracks of
the ignorance train, always barrelling,
never derailing, and the next perfects
you deserve everything you get. I don’t
blame them. It’s our egos that save us.

4.
I think I’m too nice to be canceled.
I’m practiced at practicing opinions on eye-rollers,
if not high-rollers. I enjoy mistaking boredom
for enthusiasm. The circus clown has delusions
of lion-taming, of contorting. I demand
the crowd’s Oohs and aah’s, ignore groans.
Don’t test me, kid. Don’t trust me.
After the fizz dies down in the toilet from
a good morning piss I take my B-complex
and all manner of bulky pills and vitamins.
I stimulate my pineal gland with the light of the stars.
You know what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about where the pope hibernates or
which confessional the bear shat in.