A Cargo of Green Hearts
~POEMS~
1.
unfuck the cockeye-hinged door paint scabbed as an old birch torso the house that people forgot to live in the house only the crude dead remember with their minds of torn sheets, set the windows again wide with light in which the curtains again shall come to roost dovelike unannounced and return the clatter of dishes at suppertime the fork dropped to ting like a bell the full stomach, the horseshoe over the leaning sill righted so that it can run on hooves, forever 2. also unfuck the trees of which we made pencils and toilet paper with which to write and wipe away or burned in a pyromaniacal binge let the ash and splinters transmigrate to heartwood, the old leaves sail from the ground by gravity delinquent to adorn branch tip delicately as bee-tongues let each bough at last reach its final wish, to snag a star in its trellises like a dragonfly caught in hair let the trees, the tall green sea of them climb over this old earth like slow contortionists and crush the metallurgy of unreason comparatively as St John was promised by a stern God but altogether in a different way 3. unfuck the bulleted schools the red-bloomed chalkboards resurrect the floor splattered unintelligibly in strawberry milk or if you will in brains (there are no good ways to say certain things, drink your milk fellow countrymen, eat your strawberries by the pint), realign the awkwardly scattered lunchboxes, let blood flow back into the body’s deflated carton let the students drift backwardly into the orderly desks in measurable rows with measurable limbs and grades, let the yellow tape fall from doorways and the alphabet return to order: the pointy tent of the A preceding the B of breasts which contain hearts that in turn necessitate the H and so forth the Z at the end like a lightningrod the O buffered in the middle like a tender egg laid down in a safe sea . . .but also, and for good measure, unfuck the fucker who shot for he is Most Fucked Of All, salvage his square head from the barren shoals of claustrophobic civilization, lift him like a gull, give him a meadow, a kiss he is deserving I say but if you do not agree cast him like a match into the orange eye of the sun which, beyond madness, loves everything it incinerates even death. 4. unfuck the catastrophic word the devil-made slander that ate at the table and stole the butter knives sharpening them in secret restrooms wallpapered in Russian tabloids and secondhand art, replete and out of toilet paper and while at it unfuck the media-addled mind, throttle jammed on serotonin fattened to obesity on Likes and Friends let the Void replace them with the wholesale tenderness of nothing and the silent sails of the night which go nowhere and can’t be seen even by the clairvoyant let the mind empty like a syringe and go hungry like a beggar savant, door to door searching for real bread and real water eschewing saccharine and styrofoam-like holy wafers 5. and so on with such lists. but let the dead pass on uninterrupted and let the dying do their due diligence of dying and the sorrowful their due diligence of tears for though the sky may be mended by the ozone needle threaded in azure and hummingbirds and the ravaged be made whole by the vindicating light of repurposed cathedrals, not everything should be without suffering old friend who comes to hug us at midnight so that we dream fitfully a litany of reversals lost on the road of all restful sleep Comments are closed.
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Poetry LogPoems are posted here when I'm ready to share them. I often don't title my poems. The date you see above the poem may be the date it was posted here and not necessarily the date it was created. To see more, click on the Archives below. Archives
January 2020
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