Postmodern Poetry – Xanax Pop by Lewis LaCook

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