Postmodern Poetry – Xanax Pop by Lewis LaCook

The ghosts at play beneath my skin
kill all happy thoughts. Children wither
down to sog and blisters

out on the street, under my touch.
My loving is a black cataclysm;
nympholepsy for leper’s bread.

I’ve staggered into light before:
when I was young, before all
the touching dried up, I played
the colors in my big American
backyard, blowing Spring
birds that never hung
around long enough to get
my name.

The ghosts at play beneath my skin
shake their candy-hot wings.
My nights, crowded with zombie sugar:

my dawns, doused with hounds

I was walking last night
through a city emptied by sleep
and I was walking last night
through fire blossoms of feet
covered over by vein’d pavement
and I was walking last night
through the tradition and crushed
beauty of the Poems
and I was walking last night
through every American home

We were fat in every bed
and blooming with tendrils of smoke
We were dizzy with spin
and trying to vote our conscience
though our conscience was hard to find
We had torn apart those lands
we feared and discovered them
in our dreams

I was walking like a terrorist
through a city darkened by
invisible rain
I walked like an insurgency
owning nothing but resistence
and opening from the inside
out

Careful stepping over mewling kittens
and careful sliding of careening chair.

Above a quick summer storm
moves cries from unrecognized moons.
I’ll look sternly at you, through
the laughter; nail myself to filthy

boards, the whole time above:
a quick summer storm.

These tumbling fumblng furs and new teeth!
These rumbles already passed on!

Sucking water,

the venusian venetians are blind to what
hot tolls erupt. When I was younger

among
or agog
within

hemlines embraced, hemlines followed
the course of wind-swept pelts.

It’s along those days.

My skin was and isn’t
flustered by tidal grift.

The renunciation chafes
after a while. Rain maybes
treelines slim and noxious,
so houses might pop up
and clean the grass with
streets. I’m alive

somewhere in there:
buzzing and crackling
like any electric
in-between. She puts
her hands right through
me, breaking me

up. The tornado of 1924.
Everything gets torn down.

http://willtoexchange.blogspot.com/2007/06/sheila-e-murphy-interview-of-peter.html

…every writer has a life, and every text is a development in any committed writer’s life, no? Every life finds, with the infinite, finishing schools off with that last draught. Even texts scour pill-green leaflet cars. Now he has to clean out this pipe. A commission with God as my co-pilot, Christ riding shotgun, blasts a sour morning all over the hairy walls, understand? Pudding and catsup and pudding and ketchup: I’m playing run abreast with me, cool air split by my chest sweating tenders from antiquity, in utero. That’s all we are. Then there’s some limit beyond which glass is butted against, the bitter levees holding the bigger river furl’d and unanswerable. Baptists sit in protest of a censure from embalming. Have I already made dark that prophet’s diction, listened through by grails, by onyx, by aspiration? I persimmon. An intelligent design would take into account no knowledge of its utility. He spent the long cold winter on a pair of swimming trunks, and threw away the receipt.

We gain mass as we age,
gathering it against
encroaching space.
The stacker hits as I
turn a corner from work.
On O’Neil you always think
there’s a car pulling up
behind you, because of
lights on your shoulders:
just like you imagine
vampire women, white billows
whisper’d from the edges of
the woods there. The churches
unwind with each heavy step.
We gain on where
we’re walking, as I remember,
a strain’d, jaundic’d
sac, as you say, our moon.
Waterfowl folded
into the eaves of every
empty house.

Putting (pops) out sm(all sl)udge fingers
dro(wned in sh)ops along luci(fer an)d keystrokes
with the li(fe fla)ghts yellow’d like
uneven(ing of casual) burning.

Da(rk ha)y is gray smo(thered, cl)othed lumber.
Days ben(efits’ d)eath themes of
adul(t condemn)ation, fis(ssures in logi)cal youth, and
irr(eperable, r)espons(es’ culpa)ibility.

The bl(eakness of l)ack cats prowl
out(er posture, all in)side our do(e flo)or. They howl
a mum(mmy tum)bled history throug(put, a)h
the w(hispers through coarse s)in(s take stock of )dows.