When words still existed:
I thought of paint eroding
faces, everyone
standing in a line
that went back for miles.
All evening sitting
at the top of the cliff, holding a book except the wind
kept rustling the fucking
pages.
There is a picture on my cellphone
of my brother throwing
a wheelbarrow into the
window
of a church.
He beat some guy in the head with a wrench—
its good when friends become
bookbinders.
We spent nearly six hours killing lizards;
later on, you peeled their skin and threw them into
the valley.
It’s been years since I thought of reading Dante—
rain
eroding the face
of a statue.
Turquoise thread; the remnants of a tapestry.
I knew it was a mistake
when you decided
become a historian.
In the sea is a star: in the sky
is a universe.
They met me at the entrance to the temple, next to the garden
where you spend all night growing shadows.
I wrote my name on a piece of parchment
and threw it
into the fire.
really takes off at lined nine. I'd cut "Fucking"
ReplyDeletefrom previous.
Yeah, for some reason I kept swearing in these poems, which is really unusual for me. I've been debating ever since whether to cut them out, since it feels sort of strange to have in a poem.
DeleteI enjoy the way that you have combined all your previous small poems into this larger one. I really enjoy your imagery. I would however, consider cutting out the swearing-- Im not sure it's really doing anything for your poem. Overall, good work.
ReplyDeleteI'd say it distracts (the swearing)from the main thrust--and there is THRUST in the poems. Fuck appears a few times, and I might
ReplyDeletesimply try to cut it back to one time. We certainly can swear in poems. And it works somewhat--the way it signals frustration--what it tells us about the speaker of these extremely hallucinatory poems. But what happens is we connect it too easily to bad film dialogue, and if it happens too often we get a kind of gritty
realism, and you're not really going for that here, of course.
It lessens the powerful instance when FUCK is used effectively, having to do with the alligators (as a verb).Also used in "a fucking raincoat." In that instance I think "shitty" does the job, and the two words sort of cancel each other out, you know?Disturbing poems, because they fascinate, but there seems to be some sort of terrible self annihilation going on, obsessively, hammered home by the repeated references to the violence of the face. There's a slow scary morphing of the physical, and we can see this, like a face reduced to nothing but melting wax. In "Dementia"
I wonder about "(Exhalation)." The poem is so good, so pure in its evocation of the monsters of the subconscious, the exhalation feels
pretty ordinary. I agree something needs to go in that spot. Really
great stuff . . .