Clump Spirit

My father loved his practical cadillac most at eleven every night for centuries with unwavering hope of surviving life’s fad diet brushed his teeth and exploded maybe with ambiguity maybe tala madani’s cumshot number one shaped like christ’s apostles or john lurie is gunna make it though this year of joy divorced from our investors dipped in gold jungles say a girl’s bug command is her smithy gone father says shadow the orange tree longing o devoted petroleum molecules circulate in the olfactory longing whine of leaf blowers drink him too so we believe we were young and safe and you must say great grandpa was a notorious professor at the bolognese school of this is how people speak to small children in the city of underground fighters it felt terrible when i burrowed back to life to live among the maglev of my parents brandishing their divorced saints begging light of sunken eyes disturbing the air from what i thought was pleasure was solitude was the ability to retrofit hope into the chassis of metaphor you’re stone and river i’m computer weed and the glitched up church pouring a yard of concrete through great grandpa’s white hot screen door that’s what it was a viral devotion to he who has too many preferences snoop dogg ha dichiarato di aver smesso di fumare but what about you apologetically broke my lungs filling with immaterial light which devours real light toothsome from the unknowable massacres rolling katamari like over the horizon.

‘I Was Afraid of Dying’ by James Wright

Once,
I was afraid of dying
In a field of dry weeds.
But now,
All day long I have been walking among damp fields,
Trying to keep still, listening
To insects that move patiently.
Perhaps they are sampling the fresh dew that gathers slowly
In empty snail shells
And in the secret shelters of sparrow feathers fallen on the earth.


Source: Wright, James. Above the River : The Complete Poems. A Wesleyan University Press ed. Farrar Straus and Giroux ; University Press of New England 1992, p. 142.

‘Boer War Bread Strike’ by James Schuyler

Harsh Remarks of Tranquility

Oversifted fine white flour
with little crust
and that not crisp

We cannot fight on this glue
give us the bread we are used to

Of stone-ground flour
the kissing-crust
the color of the rest
and baked right through

Bread for bread, bread
for the prisoners
each craving what
from his youth he ate
not the bread of exile
and that not crisp


Source: Schuyler, James. “Boer War Bread Strike.” Collected Poems. 1st ed. Farrar Straus Giroux 1993, p. 350.