Postmodern Poetry – Xanax Pop by Lewis LaCook

Separation in particular, terse and uncertain
all your lovers hate you eventually for

And it comes standard—your panoply
of wounds your dank whiteness against
a trailing off into untried snow

Let me show you something interesting
at least as interesting as that game show

I’m the one in the tube, crisp bills swirling

Every time you turn around, out of the corner of your eye,
you’re falling through stained glass, strained by it, pressured
by bed under your thighs, by listening through salty night
while the sun our only hope slides down the flu-shot sky,
under the weather—I suspect you have getting under something
else in mind, though as always you’re mum on that, and almost
outta pills—And that’s it: keep jutting from uncontrollable
chairs by day, and by night protruding from lanky hair
like an ur-text so soaked in tremolo I enter every room

on my knees, in particular, listlessly saltine

Hey, I’m talkin’ to you—we could slip right over
if we aren’t careful, go somewhere mostly
eyes and jilted hair and pistons purring hungrily

You’ve got too much control for that, right
when those blue moons moan animal delicacies

Your favorite frustration, she’s just human
learn to ride those TV heats you got old
under an emoticon’s implied irony; we had
a white Christmas after all, half a gram ridge

Long-haired and sweaty with a growl; someday
I’m just gonna fall over here in this alley
with impacted autoshops refracted in the puddles;
Sure, I’ll die for you; I’ll probably not have made it

to the store, and’ll be pawed by cops, until
you know, I truly have nothing that is mine at all
am just human, like the ones you see on TV,
screaming “Click Here! How did you get to be

so god damned lovely, all the way over there?”
Once someone wise told me I deserved to be hurt
so I started grabbing everything I could, stuffing
There was a pain and it was sex; I fit her in

Filled you with my shape, and it burned; flash
of ozone nosegays bristling in the surf—that’s
dazzling, moonbeam, I just need to lay down
a little bit under the tongue murders you so pleasur’d

Look at me, teacher; you’ll sleep like the dead
Rotting fruit squinting back at you as you push
your way past me and into the shallow street–
some cats when you touch them right will wrap

themselves dug deeply fang’d prickling around
your wrist, and hold there sighing—I know,
the sway of you adjunct to night air, night quiet,
I catch the stars on my tongue and learn what music

means—I’m always kneeling anyway, some density
in purities at this tempo leave you blurry when
Slow down, baby, when you’re looking my way

O Papa Legba, I sat in silence so long
at this fork in the river now I’ve forgotten
how speaking goes and the gestures we gave
those most secret of interludes aren’t tuned
properly in this climate aim at the cacti
the green lethal elixir hummingbirds churn
with the Lake lapping at our heels like a catechism
She’s just humanely knitting some daily thing
“Dead by dawn!” the mailman chirps
I bend down among the reeds and pull cotton burrs
through my smug stigmata It’s the only way I can
make her laugh There was a wind advisory
in effect this morning I play with my hair
This revelation made all the party goers sad
I’m ecstatic to be of service to the natural order
of things really hit the fan I’m thinking about smashing
her cell phone into the wall Later you made Russian
tea cakes out of sweat and swollen jellies from a dew
between your legs, so having forgotten how to speak
ain’t that bad, considering, I mean the food’s okay
vaginas are like starfish In the right light they
catch the tongue on a fugue a glutton for fudge
The skin of the mango on the pulp of the kiwi
ripples and you think about the waves the restlessness
of the Lake tapping all of us on the shoulder
trying to get directions, is that what you like?
Dressing on the side, the surprised smile of the newly dead?

You just want someone to tell you that it’s okay to hurt yourself, huh?
You want to be run through with slow riots of stars.

Smoking the seeds will make you sterile. If
dancing with me senseless dressed in snow
fables dessicate, sugar to latent rapidity
somewhere between tongue and tooth. Skins

unravel from shirts tarnished upside down (
am overshadowed by cats shooting victims
from fists of corners of blackened fur—sitting:
face side down from you on the corner left )

Usury, bitches! Flaky snail tomboyish, ill
like the business I gave you with mouth
towns you used to live in now gone, totaled;
Fist it right out of that blood-truculent till!

The seeds don’t give a shit. They’re always pushing
too hard on the obstruction of automatic doors

Call me Heat Miser. Some years ago–never mind how long precisely–
having little or no money and nothing at all particular to interest me,

the sky’s ashes still dry upon my lips drawn back in a rictus that
you’ll recognize from such films as “Grinning Koala” and “Fuck!

That Was One Bad Caesura!” I smoked in the dimness of winter
watching Lake Erie harden with diaphanous ridges. That viral message

will start pounding on them pretty heavy. The same hue is made the emblem
of many touching, noble things – the innocence of bribes, the maligned age,

negligence celibate among a mournful lullaby you’ll recognize from such films
as “Other Religious Traditions” and “I Don’t Believe It’s Gonna Be The End

Of The World” and “Moonwalking Backwards for an Answer”. Your nobility
touches me. I’m calling the cops. A man who from his humorous, deliberate

coolness and equanimity in the direst emergencies can espouse a western
viewpoint is cut in half by the window. I totally agree with Marshall

on the fact. I water plumes that sully your magnificent treachery. There are rocks
in Japan whose magnetic fields were reversed and visually numbing. Let there

be rock, and let us examine our own sedimentary deposits or cooled volcanic flows.
I’m actually just going to echo what Marshall is saying. I’m too much!

Attempted angel with cardboard wings, she said,
but the snow was too brittle, when I tried to fly
was left felt like writhing on your cold floor
alone in the distance. I was running up and down
halls shouting something at the tip of my tongue
peripheral and angular and gratuitous and vulgar
so you just kept spinning on my cold floor for
I forget. Which. But I don’t think memory
when blue stars so ice and ephemeral pant
the walls with streaks of telegraphic speech
goddammit, is my hair thinning? Not so hard,
I’d just put those soft spots in fullness to bed
and was murmured amongst silky lists by
how god did those cartwheels, and left so traces.

None of this is real, so don’t
worry about it. All my clothes
are torn and reveal recent meat
snow prowling the turnpike
thin indoor lights. I roll a fatty.

Recently, it snowed meat here
and my clothes tore me a new one
over it. Muscles condense into lucid
dew away graveyards fed by rivers
ending in spray, little duffle-bag boy.

What stock options do you provide?
What about straying into profit sharing

stares out, starlit night, all across you ached-up
silhouette? Who was never more polite
making sure you got paid thursday.

There’s something lying flat
in the road over there. Could be
you dream mints and cables, squalls
like pyrite tell you
I am some king. I am sofa
king. You’re a gentle blow-up

generally, ordering skulls in
dark corners of the house to
somnabulate, huddled
gingerly snapping up your book.
The pages to the touch are water-
honed scales. Just lie back on

the couch, Rosencrantz; your pockets
rasp with the noise of sullen rocks.