13.
chronic lyric ii
chronic lyric ii
o pain:
you strand me
on a private island
where i stare
into a private pool
its topsoil
horizon filled with ground-
up bones,
waxes, lichens, my reflection
until i drown /
you creep beyond
the borders of
your season / you
snake to stake
new places where
you can hatch /
a single raindrop
on my wrist = a
storm in my
metatarsals /
invisible gnats bite
my forearms /
tornado in the collateral
ligament / i
can’t name all the places
you try to
conquer / dots on a nerve map /
neuronal
hamlets uprising / this debacle
in my brain /
your great big boot
*
12.
chronic lyric iii
o pain:
we meet again
at the intersection
where my seams
itch and burn
the floor’s
tilt nauseates
you make sure
i’m too tired
to put on my
five-minute face
so i call off
work and bind you in a sack
i beat the sack
against the wall of my anger
until the
movement within it ceases
i bury you in
the scrawny woods behind my apt
is it funny is
it a sad wreck?
viewed from
where you perch above me
*
11.
chronic lyric iv
o pain:
i have a head
full of hot toxins
a fist full of
jute rope
i am trying not
to embrace
the ground that
hates me
ground you have
seeded with layers of capitalism
the dream of
free-enterprise for girls like me: we lose
ourselves in a
red room, ceiling tile
stippled with
razor blades
your hidden
camera waits for one to fall
for a red red
snowflake to seize the day
*
10.
chronic lyric v
o pain:
do you wanna
hear a story?
you’re being
very cross tonight
i think it will
pass the time //
my cousin texts
me a picture
of a horse
running on the beach
and in a font
suggesting papyrus
it reads good vibes only
to my naked
eyes the keyboard is blurry
i type a row of
random emojis
the last time she
texted me
was you should call to check on your mother
more often
and then my
mother starved on the couch until she was dead
good vibes only
huh
i type emoji
with sunglasses big enough to hide half my face
i lean against
the bedroom wall
impinging piriformis
abnormal levels of tryptophan
slide me into
gravity’s slick captivity
legs shake
uncontrollably
i slide forward
on to the bed
i can tell
you’re sick of stories where you’re the antagonist //
you send me off
to sleep to dream your dreams
*
9.
chronic lyric vi
o pain:
i can’t quit
your trauma drip
something about
the endocrine system
enhanced
response to painful stimuli
like circling
crows like autumn cloud scudding
i am the kitten
you thought you drowned
*
8.
Tree of the Year
These maples
are everywhere around here.
Our solid
citizen, Rotary’s tree of the year,
town councilor,
justice of the peace.
That placid
green saves the ass of real estate agents,
smoothing out
the cragged, scarred hills
hiding the
boulders, the jutting knives of rocks,
and don’t
forget the collapsed trailers,
the rusting
trucks on crumbling cinder blocks
waiting repairs
the last 20 years,
strewn car
parts, defunct washing machines,
the illegal
dump with rotting carcasses
of jacked deer
and discarded dead pets.
They hide
everything ugly, everything rotting,
everything the
drive-by tourist doesn’t want to see.
They put up
with seven months cold, summer heat,
tent
caterpillars, gypsy moths, aphids, fungi, bark disease,
beavers, wood
peckers, sugar maplers, the panoply
of annoyance,
risk, hardship, destruction.
They weep, and
we savor the sweetness.
They age into
equipoise,
embody calmness
behind deep furrows.
Stick your hand
in that gnarly, rugged bark,
sense that
core-deep, silent strength,
but fuck fine
feelings, don’t be duped.
When fall comes
there’s blood in the hills,
a torrent of
red from an ancient sacrifice
of the young,
the innocent, the sacred--
a pillar of
rocks, a place to die.
This beauty’s
not bashful, drives deep,
pleasure’s
knife-edge edging pain.
We know we could
not endure its enduring.
We sigh. The
leaves will brown, wilt, and fall.
Those leaves
swirl down within us, steady as breath.
We bow, shed a
part of ourselves, hoping,
hoping these
bare branches endure year’s dying.
~Robert Golden~
*
*
7.
Ouija
rain
comes down oblique
like questions hiding in words.
the old walls
cerebral aneurysms bleach-white.
snake-cunt streams
live bodies that seek
the comfort of flesh:
they stumble
and circle each other
drooling
unconscious
inept.
death is not even a thing.
hissssssssssssssss
it invites.
flickering tongues like pine needles burning:
conifers reverse
their traverse
and return
underground
fierce
in denial to exist.
bleach-white sky and
earth and
beach.
water sits silent, still,
like death-bed things
remembering
what will never be again.
the hisses differentiated
magnified
specialized
dog-faced, moth-shaped
blunders of black root
slashing the
antiseptic white
loud
louder
loudest 'till
the white is nothing but hiss
and the rain falls oblique
likes screams hiding in words
and storm falls on forest.
through the uproot, in procession,
you see them approach
loud
louder
loudest
vituperative
histrionic.
in town the drunks play dice.
spider-faced children
eat snakes in the streets
naked in the rain
and death
is not even a thing.
~J.C. Mari~
*
6.
in the mood for Old Par on the rocks
mind dances
in bitch expectation.
you dress
every failure
with the usual suicide nocturnes.
you know me better
than God would if he existed.
i watch you enter the room
in your nonchalance.
i can't tell
if you grimace or smile
or maybe are
just getting ready to laugh.
death won't come:
don't take it as a sign to live on
or anything else.
you write this poem
like a leper looking at
what's left of his hands.
you know me better
than the walls of my mother's womb.
give me something in, say
F# minor,
something somber, something odd...
lying on my back
mouth open to the sky
like a writhing
thing out of Dante
trying to get a little
of whatever there is
while there's any left
press down
press down
now
play
the
accompaniment
with your left
an
easy melody with the right
and
you can smoke
cigarettes while you do it
while you play
let me lie here
mouth open to the sky
watching you enter the room
about to burst
into drowned horses dreaming beer.
black water.
~J.C. Mari~
*
*
5.
He
willed the ocean to approach and willed it back.
The
water sighed like a gull’s cry.
The sky
darkened into slate.
The
water lifted and separated into the air.
When the
boy’s parents had suggested
he
should learn self-control,
this was
not what they had in mind.
~Martin Willitts Jr.~
*
4.
love
song
yr lifetime spent denying the
god of thieves, the god of drunks, and
all those houses we built just to
have them collapse beneath
the weight of despair
all the basements filled with
water or with bones
the men who leave
the ones who disappear
and i make my lists and i lock the doors and
all we do on these rainsoaked
sunday afternoons is laugh and bleed
all i am once i’ve factored in the truth
is less than i want to be
let’s not fuck these next few
moments up too badly
~John Sweet~
*
*
3.
autopsy
all afternoon the dying
sun seen through falling snow
the river turning slowly to ice
do you remember why
you never escaped from here?
can you take each day back to
the one before it, each wrong
decision, each unspoken objection?
why is it you’ve kept nothing
for the last twenty years but
the same phone number?
why does every poem need to
be written with dull blades
on bare flesh?
can’t you just accept the
total failure of who you are
once and for all?
~John Sweet~
*
~John Sweet~
*
2.
GAME OVER GO TO HELL
and then remind yourself that there is
no good day to die and then
walk slowly from room to room in the
last house your father knew
remind yourself that
all maps are lies
that every god you choose to
deny is the one true god
let yourself see the humor in stepping
out of the forest and into the
endless desert
let your thirst be what guides you
from one failed
relationship to the next
walk blindly past hunger out into the
vast open fields of starvation
~John Sweet~
*
*
1.
hour of the ascension
They said it
was a joke, having
nailed his
naked body to the fence,
having chained
him to the back of
the truck. Drove through town on
Easter Sunday
in their finest clothes.
Shot the
soldier while he slept, cut
off his feet
with an axe, burned his
body in the
village square. Said the
war had to end,
and then the
firebombing
began. The face of
God was
everywhere. Fucker just
laughed and
laughed.
~John Sweet~
