Tag: alcoholism

Disambiguate the Precedent (Assassination Attempt No. 1)

Joseph M. GeraceLeave a comment

god is
an alligator white
dunce cap common
supernatural they are kind
of fragile wicked mother
i said i don’t know you
reveal your in
cantatory power
vanishes soon of dawn
alligator called
maeve anything is yours
big smile looking
at leaves
going around
your big breath rattling
every baby born after
june 07
confused about cost and course
are you wind wisened
carried from child
to child in red eyes
we haven’t slept
for weeks drink
some of this
we need to talk
blockchain saprophyte
you imagine
not wanting to die
at cost
suddenly his girl
friend her
cadillac mania
smoldering munitions
return from orbit
burn bump and birthright debased
marlboro of denial
indifferent save a dream
david shields trashes
my bike the hourlies
and the salary men
hide like armor
ed doors
between you and i
and me confusing
memory with money
untold nights buzzing spent
the gin flower in my heart
explodes
killing myself
there’s nothing
i want more
than desire
be alive 🍼
see my alligator
grow up i was 14
or 15 didn’t know anything
in lieu of replication error
chomped a personality
by liquor light 🥃
and it worked
at immense cost
20 years
pry open my skull 💀
exorcise the inadequate
physical ruins of love 🫀
collapsed by mid-morning
one suddenly
recognizes
at immense cost
the crushing power
of Their jaw 🐊

Valzhyna Mort & Henri Cartier-Bresson, Postcoital

Joseph M. GeraceLeave a comment
Hackensack, October, 2020

violent global apocalypse
aren’t you worried brr
the mirror ball

playing with the toddler
in the parking lot
so meaningless: music in the air

there is no belarusian
version of this poem
she turns the therapist to 11

we no longer think in color
there’s only cold
dark and not dark

the prism handles the rest
the first third and fifth course
are the cheapest white wine in secret

as if it were the edge of the universe
the far away thunder of a giant waterfall
but no ambush no sauce

it’s not like they have an option
who made their black-strap shoes
their blonde bobs and toned coats

the door remains the ink remains
the windows blown into sky-gone into bricked-over
in favor of what’s left out of frame

portrait in oblivion (isa)

Joseph M. GeraceLeave a comment
Ridgewood, NJ, August 2020
she says 			i can cook vegan
she says 			savory
				nutritional yeast flakes 
				harvested for good health
our face is probably the only thing of that scale
crushed red pepper flakes
our face obsessed in its desire for duplicate
i didn't choose this sacred hardware
our battle ax-thin XXX bride
prime butch dress cascading salvo
cachaça bottle thick hairy professor
				in the window sill
				go fast,
she says					the advertisements 
to the confident			are coming to
advertisers				shake you awake

Dear Oblivion

Joseph M. GeraceLeave a comment
Lake George, N.Y., July 2020

i’ve
stubbed my tone again
against the edge
of some other universe
under the weekly
farmers market
near the free whiskey
samples retired
dentist who
summers in santa
monica who
explains volatilization
charcoal
filters in his coronavirus
mask
the perfect gift
for clark

i’ve
taken off again
around pluto
in the byzantine
eyes of man
nothing to do
wife away

i’ve
glanced out again
from my crashing
self sea

i’ve
named myself again
spoiled oil
spilled spinning
top approaches
edge gravity
angel’s share
bitter ship
gasping heir
to a ruined king-
dom of collapsed
arteries rough
concrete
sidewalk gone
feral over rough dog-
wood root

again
to say
enough.

Dear Oblivion

Joseph M. GeraceLeave a comment
Jersey Avenue, Jersey City, N.J., June 2020

So much light, dear oblivion, night after night; I offered up my body. You refused. I drank. Begged, really. Said my dreams, you don’t belong here. Some countable mornings ahead, crouched in the internet’s dark corners, hands reaching into prosaic brightness, not to gather, but offer: News spreads of a virgin conception. And so much light.

Dear Oblivion

Joseph M. GeraceLeave a comment
Main Street, Hackensack, June 2020

Prayer peels soul from body. Robin-eyed memory of never known. The scent of winter jasmine, he writes. I ascent, with neither knowledge nor trace experience. Mouth crawls with the acid taste of spider webs. Begging, really. Dear Oblivion, I continue asking the drain — conduit from, passive voice, channel away — to do the hard work. Three-fourteen a.m., a mournful eight-legged poet struggles to drag a stone amphora the size of a casket across the backyard — no vacancies.

Jersey Pine

Joseph M. Gerace1 Comment
i've lived long enough to see phaeolus schweinitzii chewing the lap of this jersey pine on a walk with my family during our first pandemic

i’ve lived long enough to see phaeolus schweinitzii
chewing the lap of this jersey pine on a walk
with my family during our first pandemic

to call us moist and poorly protected
would be rude but true nevermind
what i haven’t got is dirty hands and god

damnit if i know how to be selfless
among all these bottle caps and tarot cards
the bravado emptiness embitters inflames thickens

the grey launch of memory plunges seven
thousand feet into the lap of an idol
hard at work in the dry grass

the irony of course remains
we are alone leaning back in chinese
textiled seats without understanding

without compassion without hideous
perspective until we are alone photograph
-ing ourselves some distance from another drink.

‘Dream Song 238’ by John Berryman

Joseph M. GeraceLeave a comment

Henry’s Programme for God

“It was not gay, that life.” You can’t “make me small,”
you “can’t put me down” or take away my job
I am immune,
although it is not gay. Why did we come at all,
consonant to whose bidding? Perhaps God is a slob,
playful, vast, rough-hewn.

Perhaps God resembles one of the last etchings of Goya
& not Valesquez, never Rembrandt no.
Something disturbed,
ill-pleased, & with a touch of paranoia
who calls for this thud of love from his creatures-O.
Perhaps God ought to be curbed.

Not only on this planet, I admit; somewhere.
Our only resource is bleak denial or
anti-potent rage, both have been tried by our wisest. Who was it back there
who died unshriven, daring to see what more
could happen to a painter with such courage.

Source: Berryman, John, and Michael Hofmann. The Dream Songs , 2014, p. 257.

uh oh (kaboom)

Joseph M. GeraceLeave a comment

Wikipedia Poem, No. 975

Hackensack, 2019
the gunpowder if it ever exists dries ready full-mouthed  and mush   his
mission soon ends with no criteria    sì, quella spiga—    what athletic  
power passed the hum of squirrely / selfish putsch  down—    if darkly uplift  
the self gets righteous    right to the bottom—    quick, much is transparent 
and not raised against  the real polemic fear yr  inbox   as good as yr last   
intesa inteso—    i feel hiss intestines / push out against—    the night 
sufficient    still    bent between hiss pinching stamen & inject the sniff pop of 
style kaboom