Mental Health Awareness Day Poem

But what does it mean the guitar drones too loud what says the producer if a producer was involved at all in these cai guo-qiang epiphanies of cookie dough pit bulls leash themselves to the intersection of two corners arrive with incredulity at the real problem which looks so much as the fake problem is cautious therapizing the shadow in immense holocausts of cruelties the poor shambling well off gone feral in the face of a mirror act struggler struggling causing others to struggle with a crank of the barking knob of it all laid bare and flattened to cliche they shrug you shrug i shrug.

Hill of Jackals

Wikipedia Poem, No. 960

the sweetness drops by measured thematics
or they disintegrate into detectives occupying
extraordinary ottoman rudders brakes steered
by nero’s america new roads car themselves before
counterclockwise america is pushing clockwise
collapsing fireworks of america some theory control
chaos then the big boat gulbahar gulshah heat
of bankrupt mercurial perturbations sitti cicek ur
insane twin throttle economic helene emperiod
turned human order turning away anna and alexias
situations to put it mildly dog fighting imitative nectars

‘What’ by James Schuyler

Schuyler

What’s in those pills?
After lunch and I can
hardly keep my eyes
open. Oh, for someone to
talk small talk with.
Even a dog would do.

Why are they hammering
iron outside? And what
is that generator whose
fierce hum comes in
the window? What is a
poem, anyway.

The daffodils, the heather
and the freesias all
speak to me. I speak
back, like St Francis
and the wolf of Gubbio.

spacer1

Source: Schuyler, James. Collected Poems. New York: The Nooday Press, 1998. Print.

Indefinite Traumatic Past

Wikipedia Poem, No. 684

w684-sm

joined indefinite floodplain

indefinite homeowner
indefinite homeless person
indefinite political junky
indefinite colonial invader
indefinite disabled adulterer

full-stop
he claims

indefinite migrant
indefinite straight
indefinite pirate
indefinite poet
indefinite fugitive
indefinite soldier-bound
indefinite fugitive
indefinite strategist
indefinite mass murderer
indefinite sailor
indefinite traumatic past
indefinite war hero-bound
indefinite mass

joined father
joined brain

indefinite traumatic past
indefinite punk lash

joined father thief
joined brain indefinite fugitive

any old adulterer
full-stop he claims indefinite war hero

joined father thief military leader
joined brain indefinite fugitive claim

indefinite old quitclaim

“Seven Aphorisms” by Alda Merini

I am a furious
little bee.

To mistake shit
for chocolate
is the privilege
of the overeducated.

Every man is a friend
to his own
pathology.

I never speak
when I am not
turned on.

The gun
I point at my head
is called poetry.

Every tibia loves its fibula.

Alda Merini
is tired of repeating
that she is crazy.

 

Translated by Carla Billitteri


Source: FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry: An Anthology. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015. Print. P 493.

“Da Aforismi e Magie” by Alda Merini

Sono una piccola
ape furibonda.

Confondere la merda
con la cioccolata
é un privilegio delle persone
estremamente colte.

Oguno é amino
della sua
patalogia.

Non parlo mai
se non sono
accesa.

La pistola
che ho puntato alla tempia
si chiama Poesia.

Ogni tibia ama la sua fibula.

Alda Merini
é stanca di ripetere
che é pazza.


Source: FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry: An Anthology. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015. Print. P 492.

 

Augustin Pajou with Fragile, White Stalk on Prime Time

Wikipedia Poem, No. 560

Augustin Pajou, alt. version (detail)
“I’ll just call this what it is / My vanity gone wild with my crisis” Josh Tillman

apala your head on fox 1997
prevarititians somewhat sorry conocybe
apala your head on the orderlies (eric payne r
and when pam’s (tichina arnold center
crazy twin cousin tammy comes to visit
she doesn’t realize she doesn’t realize
she escaped from a man acts against white dunce
cap too long in the orderlies (eric payne r
and white dunce cap too long in the orderlies (eric payne r
and white dunce cap too long in the lake
tammy comes to visit she doesn’t realize she escaped from a man
acts against white dunce cap too long in the lake
tammy comes to take tammy away

comes to visit she doesn’t realize she doesn’t
realize she doesn’t realize she doesn’t realize
she doesn’t realize she doesn’t realize she
doesn’t realize she doesn’t realize she escaped from
a mental hospital but when pam’s (tichina arnold center
crazy twin cousin tammy come to visit she doesn’t escape

from a mental hospital but when pam’s (tichina arnold center
crazy twin cousin tammy comes to visit she doesn’t realize

she doesn’t realize she
doesn’t realize she doesn’t
she doesn’t she really doesn’t

Teaching Literature in a Discredited Civilization

Wikipedia Poem, No. 496

gutlight-smg-lq

houses on this dial paired  
with one who dials out 
and his block with many people on it 
         
one who moves verges on this pair  
one who dials out 
a broad bruised hand 
 
sitting on condescending they 
are many 
houses on a 5D model 
 
apartment dwellers wrong laugh condescending
cry to the condescending cry
to the moon instead of death and 5D avenues 
   
with many houses on a 5D model 
apartment dwellers 
in pairs 
 
one who dials out and is weaker for it
a wrestler wrestlers stolen long neck 
some on this block with many 5D vacancies
 
modeled after men crying under floorboards 
one who dials out 
pairs with many alcoholic halfway homes
 
just two letters 
condescending to 
          gutlight catholics 
5D model apartment dwellers with many missing hearts

‘How is the sky like a grater, Jimmy?’

grater-sm

For James Schuyler

How is the sky like a grater, Jimmy?
What is sent up for shredding?

Touches blue-bore and spark-moon,
Cloud or torch in a rush against—

No, not again, this
Is how I am like a grater.

So, what comes down lesser?
Smaller, not sky. The sky

Is neither catalog,
Nor inventory,

Litany; it is not
What comes down.

The sun sets.
You can’t see it.

I’ve put too much stock
In the pot. A carrot then.

Stalks of fibrous celery chopped down.
The pot is hungry and inconceivable,

A manic boiling, now, not always
Roiled like this, sometimes, never crying

Unable to get out from under the covers,
in bed as hilled leeks. A planned community.

Sliced thinly, not shredded alive. Small circles
Small miracles, or. I listen to Le Roi Malgré Lui,

“The Reluctant King”, on my Playstation 4
And curse the prism-sun blasting the laptop’s

Lungs and abdominal cavity. It is your task
To know when I am in this room,

It is your task to know when I am in this room.
It is your task to know

When I am looking through these eyes
Or through these eyes.