Postmodern Poetry – Xanax Pop by Lewis LaCook

for Mary

Every day I’m grateful
Walking Lorain streets almost wholly empty
Walking beneath a crumpled sky pink and magenta
Every day I’m grateful

Rain pivots and dollops its allusions
I smoke a joint right after I take my pill
I think of you and the walls and the loops
You just can’t seem to get out of your head

Every day I’m grateful that my head’s gotten out of me
and has taken only the form that formlessness imposes
You’re so quick to feel so left out
and so old you believe it lights the cave

Every day these shadows on the wall assail me
They believe in me they say though
even I know there’s something back there
moving in the containment of its own silhouette

I’m good with emptiness
I’m full with emptiness
I’m fraught with emptiness
This emptiness amazes me

Everyone leaves you you say
because you saw your backyard tree
missing some branches

Saturdays nurse with winetits slow approaching cars which crack, then bone, fine fine dust and gravel converging below a bursting erectile moon. I think I grow restless when the Spring comes; come walk with me, lay right down; come clenched to me, foaming as my shoes come untied, the knots rushing past are such and exactly as they should be. Someone’s pitbull wants my throat. It’s still cool enough for this jacket, to lace the overgrown lawns with music, in the air ripe porous or gummed with spore; that poor medicine. When I come to these fields, obtuse with sulphur, the nurse with the wine pours herself a chair. In those clouds scratched above the moon.

I walk through a storm
when everything is blue.
A car furiously escapes, peeling
mosquito shaves from grounded

air. And lightning shrivelling
such aimless skies tonight.
We’ll work through this together,
but my feet cripple me later, by

then all those houses stick to them.
She started talking about
ghosts and killings and shit.
I guess you know what I mean; colds

arrange their fluent sheaves
around us, as on Toledo Road
as on North Ridge, arresting walking
sleep: this is a fuck of demon.

They connect behind the
Circle-K. I’ll speak to you
in lights, and kneel. You’ve never
lost anything. I win. Blue breath.