Postmodern Poetry – Xanax Pop by Lewis LaCook

Java Beans is a component architecture
for Java. It’s finally a little later.
Winter hits us strangely here on
the Black River, green and snaked

with disease. Everyone’s coughing
as they wait in line for
the guillotine. My quills
adrift in liquors distilled from
everything else. I’d gladly

trade my foreground with your
background, if only a little later
you’d hold me as I shook the rain
from my head. Rolling off
the hot tin roof, I’m a fool to believe

that subclassing the atmosphere
and parsing the distances between
myself and other people will ever

stop me from eating the centers from
everyone I love.

You walk water towns, faceless and arrogant.
Dripping crystal limbs of pure light.

Dripping crystal lint of puree light.
You walk water tower faces, endlessly ignorant.

Endlessly raining, seamlessly sick.
Drifting critical patch. Pretty life.
Endlessly faceful, determined to saturate.

Light purls. Gingerly forceful,
You walk water, down to faceless.

Ending arrogance.

…with blur for a head. Torrents churn beneath the architecture, which has become a neutral word for me, and denotes all this scaffolding crashing down around my bare ankles. One pill wakes my ass up and sets me to thinking. Donald Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, Vol I II III IV. I’m trying to accept everyone for who they are, and not for what I feel they could be if they weren’t so damned stupid. Poems are no different than eating, sleeping, discarding of waste by-products (shit, piss, but not semen, semen isn’t waste). I save them in a jar behind the door, Eleanor Rigby! I’ve never understood their precocity. But for the most part I feel that my life has passed beneath streetlamps, somewhere in the menagerie mash-up of Lorain’s drunk streets, mistaken by passersby for a girl because my hair is long, because I stumble blurting poetry or I stumble bleeding pictures. I think the males’ heads fill up with nitrous oxide at age 13, and don’t deflate until they’re 30. No doubt, this can be deconstructed. Flies on a rail. The flood of flower rouge, of funky latitudes engaging jasmine sacrilige, jiggy with it at last! The work of the Damned…

The screen burns my eyes out, so now I can see
the true nature of in-itself, which is Mary
and the kids flutter at the edges of their world.
They have their mother in their pockets, in Iraq,

where hungry Americans eat history. All told,
code is obsessive with maps, even when girls
grow into and out of unbounded crags. In fact,
the kids soak up any drop of pressure they can,

and Mary just hates herself most of the time. Back
of the mouth and through a rough void, the shellac
hardens, and kids grow into and out of their world.
Even if I’m blind, I still drown, just like you.

Movies run backwards, movies we unfurled.
The film on my eyes is where we’re all trapped.