Postmodern Poetry - Xanax Pop by Lewis LaCook

The father and the other father
study how to contrast
He always has a smile for truck-stop waitresses
He’s always gnawing on his hands
He lays on the floor to give me belly-island
He pulls me across the room by my hair
and calls me a cock-sucker
The father and the other father
learn how to sabotage my moods
He murmurs below my breath about how
no-one could ever love me
He fits himself into my walk
and tells me he raised a leader
The father and the other father
can’t know anything about me now
because they’re both dead
and I’m alone here getting high among
her valentines

for Lindsay

I’d do anything not to be in that cold room
as you can tell by the pills I just washed down

Well, everyone’s gotta sleep
even vein-frosted stars fogging the windows

Everyone’s gotta learn sometime
The safety of angels, come-hither at the threshold

pulling me to some half-remembered satisfaction
before mothers do what they do, and fathers

crack jagged and askew along the walls of your sleep
You murmur that the cold can’t touch me, and warm your hands

for Lindsay

Oh, Becky: you do quite beautifully
arriving at the show almost bare chested
setting such luscious fire across me
I feel like I’m talking too much
and Ctesias must have infected me with Indica
because suddenly I’m a dog-faced man
chopping wood in the pinched bank of Erie shores
I swear I remember the glacier
and how the pressure built a slow heat around me
every time I sink into your soft mouth
My cock, perched on your grandmother’s steering wheel,
becomes so wholly yours almost at once
I’ve been living off the meat of the re’em so long
your oranges and cantaloupe trickle through my beard
and sugar on my chest like pricks of lightning
I lay awake dizzy nights listening for the cry of the monoceros
as it gallops through the harmony of our moans

1. I do not give power up easily. Because I am powerless before her, she terrifies me.
2.The night watches me through the windows.
3. Why why why why why why would I need
4. Blind to a moon’s corpse sloughing slick blank aphids every time she’s laughing shakes core reverence virginities, a gun curled raucous and taller around my blue throat
5. You are hearing me.
6. Oh, by all means. Let’s hear something
7. I’m still fucking thinking about Gertrude Stein
8. Again, fuss effervescent with scarred muscles, long sourdough fundamentals, usually in intervals of fifths or minor thirds. And this is why I still visit the house.
9. The trunks the trunks the trunks the trunks. I can hear you sigh
10. Rap-rap-rapping on that fucking chamber door
11. I have dreams. I’m not a saint.
12. I got stars all over you
13. Vents trees, steals cigarettes, stabs hot dog vendors, stabs stabs panther-size kitten, is glad to, expresses sincere concern over, finds fault in others’ documentation
14. Fly towards the open area
15. Flying dreams fall under a category of dreams known as lucid dreaming. Alyssa Marx and David Gray of Flying Dreams perform stunning aerial and acrobatic circus acts wordwide including doubles aerial silks. Welcome! Family doings and photos, Linda’s televison sites. Among the most common of dream motifs that almost everybody has experienced is the flying dream.
16. Webster’s defines poem as as the most common common the most common, of, the most common.
17. I used to roll pinners while my momz cooked dinner
18. Now, under certain conditions I am gregarious. I spout. I trill.
19. Along longing hum-buckled cousin scrotum squash green husky sudden-like. And sometimes this would last a while. Always had to bring a book.

for Lindsay

Stories of men who have caught the sun in a noose
are widely spread–Mountain of dried herbs,
the magic things cops can do with computers.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime

I got Ice in my Veins, Blood in my Eyes,
my mind on that bubble you-know-where
This net is intended to catch the sun
I swear I can respond intelligibly to this

Your eyes, which are beyond, can’t be painted because painting is counterfeit—me, I just woke up, rebooted, took some pills, bought some cigarettes, then someone spoke and I went into a dream about you, an achy dream that peered into your flesh, looking for that soft and fragile hidden—your shih tzu shot out of the blue—all through school I had a lop-eared bunny-pet, his name was goethe because John and I loved to address him as hare goethe, get it, hare, herr—here I woke one afternoon he spasmed and he died—and that was the end of my first marriage, as if the rabbit had come to represent our home—I dream your home is with me, Lindsay Colleen, tracing the densities that make universe possible within you—i hear you breathing over there—rubbing my chest in the bloody ice—rubbing you in your liquid state into my heart again and again—the clearest thing I remember about my father’s death is—when did you start coming in a cream–

They announced it over the loudspeaker
in school

With the singularity of gesso
the trace and taint of curdled language
What I dragged behind me I chose to drag behind me
fog-milk skimming the margins of my skin