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.

Stuck Tight Old Boy Stuck Tight

“My word / Hand caught in the door / Stuck tight old boy stuck tight”

‘Safety Lock’ by Louis Aragon

My word
Hand caught in the door
Stuck tight old boy stuck tight
In other words
Or
The password please
Many thanks
Now I hold the key
The bolt begins to twist like a tongue
Therefore

Trans. Michael Benedikt


Source: Aragon, Louis. “Safety Lock.” The Poetry of Surrealism, edited by Michael Benedikt. Boston: Little, Brown and Co, 1974, p. 151.

Photo: Gerace, Joe. “Stuck Tight Old Boy Stuck Tight” Nov. 14, 2020. JPG.

Men in Hats Rise from the Ground

“Men in hats rise from the ground: / Bless these broken dolls and mend them.”

‘Five O’Clock’ by James Schuyler

Men disport themselves.
They help each other:
“Reach in my chest and massage my heart.
I am not dead.”

If clouds are God’s table linen,
what is rain?
He gave men towels to dry themselves.
He blessed their soap.

The city grew like the desert, by erosion
Men walk in it.
God is not so much dead as resting.
His seventh day has just begun.

Men step out of the wind.
They give money and necessaries.
They steal what belongs to them.
The eighth day, doors open on new sights.

Men in hats rise from the ground:
Bless these broken dolls and mend them.
What goes through cloth, walks and floats?
We rise lightly in you.


Source: Schuyler, James, James Meetze, and Simon Pettet. Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Print, p. 179.

Photo: Gerace, Joe. “Men in Hats Rise from the Ground” Nov. 14, 2020. JPG.

New York, 02062017

All photographs copyright Joseph M. Gerace/wikipoem.org