Postmodern Poetry – Xanax Pop by Lewis LaCook

There’s a giggle that rises while I serene
about scenes outside my window on C Street

They say the city’s dying and I too am on
loan from somewhere But someone below my window
sings softly into this vivisected morning

and the notes what holds the notes together
Where is the difference between a melody and a chord

Kittens bat whatever can be found on the floor
around the house A wound I’ve long cowered in unwinds

Untied hunger and thirst As it’s just a giggle a crack
of sound in the shift She’s sewn her summer dresses
up around her head Walking fields

When I can hear the birds cars growling down
C street and Florida Avenue tiny high-pass
lengths of rhythm walking melodic lemon
naming kills some of us in some small way
but small ways walk us upright man in a white
wifebeater slicing edges of his lawn trickles
down the curb cigarette balanced in his pinched
mouth spitting out white wives of noise whole
loaves fat with sunshine I can hear the birds
pick at them

You wake to nausea a negated sea and the clock starting over and over staring at you across much earlier than you’d like. Earlier your ears remembered the alarm going off and debt haunting like traces of semen pulled over your mouse pad like you moved there, but of necessity performative, neither from nor to but inhabiting. Well. The burned are already whispering to you those secrets that recoil while firing flames gnawing at the mid-range in her belly of sounds. But why does the first connection attempt fail? Because of sophistication testicular references enhance nascent craters arching busty like a parsed vellum a level of velor and unbridled candor or abandoned. On between as in and or among. Fucking time-based art you wake to, a nigger sea is me creased and siphoning left feelings eating others’ regard for me the wastes of some distance to love up on ivory stilts. And on her belly of sounds. You’re rigid at the gears that arch her back along an engineer’s ocean. Anyone can have a word-processing. Well, the burned are up and at it again their gain flailing knobs and flooding headphones while uploads whisper those secrets that recoil after pressing on with the business. Oh, there are many wonderful things to worry about! Like kind of partially incomplete. SARS. Upturned leaves today give the appearance of immaculate dogwood god-hungry jackal, slipping orbs almost Orphic but moodily ore your ears scream, screw your ears. Damage like this is a diamond to spell check. Almost anyone can have a habit of word-processing. This avian flu has come muddied with dust moaning yellow bathes in salt last month the whole belly of sounds bean tucked away in raining folds thickening rapidly. Damn! Tits are a lovely reminder of gravity! But it’s only a lake as of yet, here where glaciers must have you on the coffee-table. You’ll maybe spend a few hours on your ivory stilts maybe walking or lurching through cities the crust removed and so exposed soft bread fiber at fruit. Having a sudo bash.

Oh, she’s got this beautiful tapering down below! You wake to now slowly wooden swollen fists. Later on the alarm has rungs.

for Mary

I wish I could tell you and I wish you’d
believe: there’s nothing here that’s thinking
when I stare out across space. Ask about

my ideal self all you want: I’m always nude
to the point that is everywhere
with no circumference. I’m just like you.

I know everyone’s fucked-up and sinking.
I know everyone’s beautiful with fracture.
I love that I dive those slow depths across space

and that you try to follow. I can tell you doubt
is the loudest crash and the softest liftoff.
But I can’t tell you my name.

I’m using a copy of Lyrical Ballads as a doorstop. It helps breezes circulate the carcinogenic heat. It helps me think.

Honestly, I don’t need to think so much. I brim with fleshy flowers; they bend far below my eyes, breathe the waste from my lips, pilsner lipids to indeterminate points of refraction. Confections tumble from slits in the hot white sky; they collect on C Street in crusty puddles that serrate reflections. When I examine myself I find that I am sharp.

When I pause to listen to the birds I see they’re singing love songs.

The air becomes difficult to move through.

Coughing sweats out marijuana and amphetamines heightened like a cat’s skin impulsive and propuls’d or lonely like a car pulling up in front of the house flattening talc birds. Everyone’s walking the weather crumpling shadows of full-bloom’d leaves strewn on C street. There is also space as that architect’s empathy thaw’d the rawness in the throat or lovely like a car stepping out from its driver as becoming sanguinely precipitation.

The shadows of leaves are like a cellophane. Everyone’s pulling over their own eyes the seizures amounting to toll.

Something everyone wanted to tell you is: let me be kind to you let me a rain aim’d across the intersection. Let tens curl rust like lifting quadratic tarps. Feline impulses received among sore nodes thicken the difficult to move through whole shoulders of fields of orchids of water. Everyone’s inflated taste buds.