Postmodern Poetry – Xanax Pop by Lewis LaCook

Webster’s defines “Doubt” as:

Teach me electric boogaloo, Don Juan! To Obiwan this string-dark dope, this painful escape, this singing singed but blasted from tapping, and to hell with Bing Crosby! Bio-Dome is from an auteur! Bound head to ass, dead AIDS genomes, deepening with fiscal siphoning, or I must have gone home with children unbeknownst of time, empire. You get ‘em together and they make cameras to watch one another around each others’ things. Waist-deep asleep, Mary, smooth brown soothing white, the Oracle ovoid with a round emptiness dangling from her mouth as she snores, oh boy! I wanted to get away from music for a change. Did you feel this shift into a major key? Gosh! Victory becomes civil when mornings roam unimpeded through Volvo graves. Polite but impregnable, I’m lactating from pure tattoos of the essence of objects; naturally, to pry Idea from Form. I’m a human beatbox in the cave but I swerve between evolving and fumes! I’m a human beatbox in the cave but I’m a virgin, too, when it comes to getting through this.

Wave your hands in the air. Swing them like you just don’t care.

Webster’s defines “This brilliantly planned and orchestrated crime” as:

Mike and I talk Art in unsophisticated terms, which means we really talk art. I’m rolling my own cigarettes, and it snows shreds of goldencrimson brown flakes that expand when you breathe them in. Such is my desire to fill me with whatever air can offer. Leslie calls looking but I can’t do much, clean my glasses with Windex thinking that maybe it’s just my eyes, the soft edges of objects defining themselves but weakly, in kiwi Frankenstein. Mary reads Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father–I wonder what she thinks of such a scattered, fragile thing? Were those nightmares when I was a kid really about the dumpster behind Lakeview Elementary? I went walking down there the other night, stoned, listening on headphones to a music made without instruments, and the house my father died in creeped me out so much I hurried. Two mannish silhouettes will follow you. Why do I never share with anyone whatever seems sacred to me? You’re tailed by two poolish eyes, glinting off the second-story window of the house my father died in. You’re just right, Mary, because you too are restless inside, like really restless, and we share an gorgeous instability, raucous and ravening. Shaun Ryder raves on. You dreamed when you were a kid that you were a butterfly’s man, and you moved volute wings via sexed pulleys via tracks.

Mine. Mine mine mine.

Webster’s defines “Modernism” as:

That’s the point at which the working artist realizes she has whored her senses out to the public. It was, with valour and honour, a central preoccupation of the aristocratic spheres. Around my nipples velvet stars burst like the first bite of just-ripened pear. In my olive pants I drip with saltwater, dropping fish in shimmering lines across the sides that I walk. The Law precludes dulcimers, zeniths, and chlamydia. That’s the spot where each sentence enters the next slowly, issuing from its tail. The birth of threaded blocks. Nothing is less certain today than sex, behind the liberation of its discourse. This is touch-talking, or the true language of objects. My half-sister works in a Wiccan store. Valves. It would seem that I have either lost rhythm, or lost conciousness.

The drum provides a sense of continuity, interspersed through bleached tones.

Webster’s defines “The Things I See From The Corners Of My Eyes” as:

Shouldn’t that be with? Instrumentality verses location, location, location. Blunt hums, nuts. A tube yellow root dissidents amiable but liquor’d upper rooms. I put my finger but from? And how? A tub of sallow tours of virgin hours on tap. The guy’s a fucking gentleman. Lorain baroque after dusk.

Eventual frames murder us stupid on down the line.

Webster’s defines “Loyalty” as:

No way no-how. Uh uh. Walking home last night I finally got to the top of the bridge. The moon is slung across my shoulder and looks sick, yellow, anemic. Music becomes the only way I touch language, while language becomes the only way I live. That was a very weak verb. Atop the Black River, legs aching, breathing unevenly but with great eventuality. No. You’re wrapped in a wind that allows for the shape of your body and its motion. Lord it over miscounting, please. Each step a demonstration of choking.

Chocolate, velvet, obsidian, midnight.

Webster’s defines “Exposition” as:

The space which I previously inhabited, as fast as I can: Lying like a black stream of cat, allay’d. Yellow between carbonations. Butane roughens up her gentle mouth at each downbeat of the see-saw. All of Lorain is connected by veins of allies deadending in blindness and slips of itch along joints. Slim. Today a cupped sun fritters sloth hours. I have houses behind me in which IO streams cast shadows in iron squint, and some nights they stand at the foot of my bed, crying me to sleep with a people’s fount. I would explain it thus:

I almost miss the recital.

Webster’s defines “Suffering” as:

Let me tell you the peace. Children rolled in thin sheets this season nominate flea-foam from kitten mouths for currency. I’ll trade that bound for fuel to smoke this. Take your mp3-player for a walk; under your skin, within it, time mints a lichen of cholera in technological colors, to trade for kinetics. Everyone I’m related to carries food for hours. When we get to the table, the stylesheet makes it very clear we should wait. To belong to a class, one must display similar properties, or declare oneself as an extension. You know, the feeling you get when you’re surrounded by familiar forms, flowing through familiar tasks. This commonality, sometimes expressed by reciprocal language, sets your partner at ease; half the time, all we really want is a mirror. But then sometimes, when I’m walking along minding my own business, I wish the pavement would collapse, and my next step be falling.

But mostly, branches moaning with leaves.

Webster’s defines “Comfort” as:

The K-9 unit barks rabidly as I cross the bridge. I smile back at the blank cop in the driver-seat; they’re always behind dark glasses, the purported protectors, so you can’t see their eyes, ever. How can you protect anybody when you’re behind dark glass? The clouds rake across the bridge, which is up now because a boat wants to leave the Black River and slip into Lake Erie, maybe on its way to Canada. They’re behind a deeper, clearer glass: the glass of my own sight. This is neither a solid nor a liquid, but something slow, something with lips of glaciers, speech of dry, cracked air. Why is the world always popping around me like that? As I walk, I feel this early August heat closing around my body, misting my thighs. I’m carving a space for myself in it, or is it simply giving me my perimeter? The other day, in the middle of the city, near a house set far back from the street, someone had propped one of those leaning silhouettes against their porch; in dim light, you’re supposed to believe that someone’s leaning against that house, smoking a pipe.

This is not a pipe. At least, on good days like this, I do believe the heat has something it can close upon

Webster’s defines “Public Speech” as:

It’s like sleeping in water breathing in water it’s like, beads of sweat popping inside your clothes in little wet flowers, little wet mouths. The cigarette sits on the desk before me. How long have I inhabited this divine confusion, where you define finitude as somewhat slanted and enchanted? Five common PHP design patterns, she says, but while she sleeps this sleek sincere elation. I haven’t been outside in days. It’s a bit like holding your breath until your blood cries out from the dust, froid, froid, froid! You’ve seen that movie, haven’t you? In your sleep your hair dances within the currents. I crush my breath out on it as it waves by, and I think about the many ways we have to represent water, how hard it is for 3-D Computer Graphics to represent these in-betweens of states of mater, liquid and haze, smoke and ocean, fire, fire, fire.

I think to of the gradations. There is only the Literal, my dear, and these shades are just other states we know exist, but rarely touch. Why do we limit what we know to these abrupt endings?