Postmodern Poetry - Xanax Pop by Lewis LaCook

There’s a giggle that rises while I serene
about scenes outside my window on C Street

They say the city’s dying and I too am on
loan from somewhere But someone below my window
sings softly into this vivisected morning

and the notes what holds the notes together
Where is the difference between a melody and a chord

Kittens bat whatever can be found on the floor
around the house A wound I’ve long cowered in unwinds

Untied hunger and thirst As it’s just a giggle a crack
of sound in the shift She’s sewn her summer dresses
up around her head Walking fields

When I can hear the birds cars growling down
C street and Florida Avenue tiny high-pass
lengths of rhythm walking melodic lemon
naming kills some of us in some small way
but small ways walk us upright man in a white
wifebeater slicing edges of his lawn trickles
down the curb cigarette balanced in his pinched
mouth spitting out white wives of noise whole
loaves fat with sunshine I can hear the birds
pick at them

You wake to nausea a negated sea and the clock starting over and over staring at you across much earlier than you’d like. Earlier your ears remembered the alarm going off and debt haunting like traces of semen pulled over your mouse pad like you moved there, but of necessity performative, neither from nor to but inhabiting. Well. The burned are already whispering to you those secrets that recoil while firing flames gnawing at the mid-range in her belly of sounds. But why does the first connection attempt fail? Because of sophistication testicular references enhance nascent craters arching busty like a parsed vellum a level of velor and unbridled candor or abandoned. On between as in and or among. Fucking time-based art you wake to, a nigger sea is me creased and siphoning left feelings eating others’ regard for me the wastes of some distance to love up on ivory stilts. And on her belly of sounds. You’re rigid at the gears that arch her back along an engineer’s ocean. Anyone can have a word-processing. Well, the burned are up and at it again their gain flailing knobs and flooding headphones while uploads whisper those secrets that recoil after pressing on with the business. Oh, there are many wonderful things to worry about! Like kind of partially incomplete. SARS. Upturned leaves today give the appearance of immaculate dogwood god-hungry jackal, slipping orbs almost Orphic but moodily ore your ears scream, screw your ears. Damage like this is a diamond to spell check. Almost anyone can have a habit of word-processing. This avian flu has come muddied with dust moaning yellow bathes in salt last month the whole belly of sounds bean tucked away in raining folds thickening rapidly. Damn! Tits are a lovely reminder of gravity! But it’s only a lake as of yet, here where glaciers must have you on the coffee-table. You’ll maybe spend a few hours on your ivory stilts maybe walking or lurching through cities the crust removed and so exposed soft bread fiber at fruit. Having a sudo bash.

Oh, she’s got this beautiful tapering down below! You wake to now slowly wooden swollen fists. Later on the alarm has rungs.

for Mary

I wish I could tell you and I wish you’d
believe: there’s nothing here that’s thinking
when I stare out across space. Ask about

my ideal self all you want: I’m always nude
to the point that is everywhere
with no circumference. I’m just like you.

I know everyone’s fucked-up and sinking.
I know everyone’s beautiful with fracture.
I love that I dive those slow depths across space

and that you try to follow. I can tell you doubt
is the loudest crash and the softest liftoff.
But I can’t tell you my name.

I’m using a copy of Lyrical Ballads as a doorstop. It helps breezes circulate the carcinogenic heat. It helps me think.

Honestly, I don’t need to think so much. I brim with fleshy flowers; they bend far below my eyes, breathe the waste from my lips, pilsner lipids to indeterminate points of refraction. Confections tumble from slits in the hot white sky; they collect on C Street in crusty puddles that serrate reflections. When I examine myself I find that I am sharp.

When I pause to listen to the birds I see they’re singing love songs.

The air becomes difficult to move through.

Coughing sweats out marijuana and amphetamines heightened like a cat’s skin impulsive and propuls’d or lonely like a car pulling up in front of the house flattening talc birds. Everyone’s walking the weather crumpling shadows of full-bloom’d leaves strewn on C street. There is also space as that architect’s empathy thaw’d the rawness in the throat or lovely like a car stepping out from its driver as becoming sanguinely precipitation.

The shadows of leaves are like a cellophane. Everyone’s pulling over their own eyes the seizures amounting to toll.

Something everyone wanted to tell you is: let me be kind to you let me a rain aim’d across the intersection. Let tens curl rust like lifting quadratic tarps. Feline impulses received among sore nodes thicken the difficult to move through whole shoulders of fields of orchids of water. Everyone’s inflated taste buds.

A morning on which I swallow an orange capsule and smoke a thin joint and read Mairead Byrne’s blog Heaven which is and slit my eyes over the ashes on my desk and think about John and his bitterness over visitation and wonder how odd it is to be older and more feelingly open to contentment and Leslie married to him now which is like a low TV on in another room of course and I can just make out some words but really its static is like a razor-blade pillow elementary mellowness and of course the trouble blunts nullified or moot on these gregarious mornings on which I read Mairead’s poem “On Being A Recluse” and want to tell everyone about how that’s when the animal is moving through the room in which you sleep and damnit I don’t want to fight with anyone and damnit why can’t I have Hillary AND Obama and the sun through these late-spring trees is all I know or need of love and then a morning on which I kiss the void laughing and tell it I’ll be home for lunch

I sleep with a picture of you under my tongue
running through my flesh like a fire through
cornfields—When everything I touch
curls in on itself, contorting to fill
water’s physique—as in ripped paper, gels
bubbling—or you could find no more
words for it, that day your ears bled
laughed and turned back to her reading

If only that had been the end of it–
noting these submerged systems, clock’d
lusters soaked with chlorine, enfeebling
the coals your picture becomes of me wasted
pounding out hot tortilla on the rocks–
If he wanted to do this he shouldn’t have sent
that letter his own father a companionship order

She gnaws liquid images, queues a full moon
just atop your ashy mouth

All we’ve had to work with lately
are these gray days like walls

mazing our emotions
When it rains I question my faith
in punctuation—nothing in this world

is so elaborate as this breath
curling through this still house
so used to abruptness

I wish that rain went right through me
and I felt right enough to kiss

She hangs a heron shower
curtain while I organize
web marketing (below certain
thresholds the kids erupt

through the door from school like
schizoid noise blooms) into campaigns

I’ve grown accustomed to this
detachable head. The company
advances across burning, bringing
(i don’t care what the syllable

counters say, i just work the irritants
out) quicklime wires hold me

warm

I wish I was a coy nature poet
or immaterial. There are whispers

along the floodgates; slowly, the people
are forgetting how shapes go, and contort
without precision

Because you have to face a smooth white,
not this: particulate storm-clouds
dusking across the ache of your body

At least here we’ve made inroads
to a peach, um, peace of sorts
The pores distend forever with an intention
guessed-at but all-in-all not particularly

important. On Sundays I know I’ve failed
the sky because pools of inattention
thicken, and we’re out of cocaine

Houses with turrets rut and turn
quick below the touch. Let’s imagine
a street quieter than this one on

a Saturday, and more choked
with gothic. The ones with the taped-
down doors make me nervous.

I imagine the dead numb and filled
with stars; like getting so high
even relief is beneath you.

You probably like those midnight
allies so black with going nowhere
following becomes epic. That’s some

killer shit. Bit by bit they’re boarding
up Lorain, Ohio, and leaving it
to starve the ghosts out of its guts

Technorati Tags: lorain, ohio, ghosts, houses, saturday, postmodern poetry

I could have been watching
the sky shrivel dawn widening
a thick dark lake.

Skin below skin around
time thickening as private property
dropped off into some purer oblivious

ending through which the ground
could or couldn’t be seen.
I could have been helpless, lessening,

only barely a filter for low winds
or niche above upending.
But I was poring over lapse.

On the east side of Lorain, Ohio
trees bend over silent streets
as if the weight of the sky is
too much. I spin along the sidewalk,

crystal and efficient, another mad
man out in pitch night, looking for
the mauve in a vault of storm clouds
that released on us before dusk.

A curtain is open quarter-way on
the second floor of Stan’s Grocery.
Houses push me through the street
making ghost more of me each block

…which in itself is wherefore
an inconstant innoculation
or suffering a returning
flaccid morning orange blossoms

flotilla inelegant and slightly bruised…
I lost that solid deliciousness by shirking
impromptu mesmerisms replete with dawn
stumbling down this new gravel alley…

Funky Cold Elyria

Thanks go out to Michael Kapalin for helping out on this one. His input was invaluable.

Dystopia Main Title Theme

You let it burn (through) your hands
and these sharp liquids cut your tongue
(talking a sour mash)

Are we living now with the lights on
so we can see the keyboard (the hurry
like a whirl of cum below the flesh
and as such has its own heart
beat) if powders and smoking cannot
undone my languages encoded with desperate
attempts on moonlight crying out
into a desired rain (deserted
but saturated with venal calves
hidden in the cavities hidden in
sugars so round they disassemble nerves
without hope nor hunger) we mean
i’m thought to sacrifice here
cock hard like piston embraces dying
and now we’re living in laying
like so many other diseased toys
worn flat but definitely not as desperate as
(I’m sure you need me to be but can’t)