Great Emotional Distress

from drink
her wife
laughs

she breathes
hard and
throat cracks

in her sleeping
layers of
green magma

rise up
through her body her
old girlfriend math

the poem
can take a punch
through green ice

scream for
attention
like a snake

with
wings squeezing her neck why laugh now? the
trauma

behind her back
did she remember
to brush her teeth

with a knife
she’s a small man
and she assumes

she will strike
her skull
with a mallet

force a hose into
her mouth
and fill her belly

with water
this makes it
easier

for the blade
to separate
the skin

from
her body
still hard

to understand
why her
wife is laughing

the
neck a threshold between body and
world

leaches
build cities on her tongue
she’s allowed

their need
for power
and profit

to supplant
her need
for kindness

and contentment
now
suddenly

she’s unconstitutional
the problem
is her

insistence
everything be
histrionic, but orderly

from celebrity
marriages
to concentration

camps
doctor help her please
dream

abstractly
the door
left

unlocked
around her teeth
plink

through the night
twenty eight
gorgeous porcelain

necks
she remembers
the dreams of others

before
her own
the selenite grotesquerie

of her exposed
femur
cause

the viewer
great emotional
distress

New Reform Temple with Snow (How to Fully Inhabit Your Characters)

Wikipedia Poem, No. 986

Barbara Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1945. After attending Syracuse University, the School of Visual Arts, and studying art and design with Diane Arbus at Parson's School of Design in New York, Kruger obtained a design job at Condé Nast Publications.

you love/live;
you don’t know the woman
trying to
hold the woman what is this poem about? nancy me — about?
it’s overflowing and and you you get someone trying to tell her story
nancy tells you doesn’t she?
you don’t
know don’t listen
don’t know this woman is what
this poem is about? nancy me
it’s about me suffuse with meaning to get something
to get at her story
u don’t know the woman trying to get at her story she’s dead

something with meaning
her story hold the woman
woman this poem of explicit
gravity overflown with telling
the person who assigns
meaning to her story
it’s overflowing her story
telling/experiencing: woman is about the poem?
nancy me it’s about? nancy
me about? cold and gentle
suffuse with her story
saturated undulating up
meaning feeling material breath
feeling material meaning breath

hold the reality it’s overflowing down
her story is dead she’s dead
she’s the person who

Debriefing (Purple Chrysanthemum in the Dark)

Wikipedia Poem, No. 980

purple chrysanthemums when he's locked in currency
Saddle River, 2019

purple chrysanthemums
when he’s locked
in currency

his girlfriend he presumes
can’t smell her rose
his long black presumption

in the dark
it’s nobody’s job
to shine boots

antoni sneaks off
stateless watches
arrange shirts the hour

he’s locked
each day precedes
verde lungs

value in chrysanthemums
his girlfriend dollar watches
blossoming arrangements of purple

he presumes he can’t smell her rose
he presumes blackness further
his girlfriend presumes he can

smell her boots
arrange her shirts
the hour sneaks off

locked in the dark
each day
lungs verde

it’s nobody’s job
to dirty dead boys
in the dark

Love Poem

Wikipedia Poem, No. 903

the heavy thumb of the apocalypse
taut line completely ignored
left hand of panic openness space pause
i had a girlfriend
who stole me books
was the earliest gospel
just to escape his terrible flailings
the intense confusion
mob of dogma jesus dolefully debates
a cry for his moral and ethical message—
one lives by sailing against doctors’ sacrosanct spirit
rather than debating pitifully one’s own cry for help—
the unscalable pure voice of confusion
reveals itself when one falls after love

gringo interventions & coups d’etats

Wikipedia Poem, No. 895

the picturewomen that brought the fair says the flare of mysterious sun nests in blood. the same age i waited for you in the girls we could break into goodness. like as in loved. asleep. you die. no sun in roots and whiskey and seems fair though therfucking the place up, tangled in a ghost—hieroglyphics i dream of spider blood. like love, with its finger on the bar, i dream of you at scale, just a kid, really, laughing in place. tangled in a ghost—hieroglyphics i come to understand the girls we made you soak in barnight. i come to nests of you instead. i say lookout with its clear finger. what’s new? drugs wet with clear-air always sitting in nests of mysterious spiderstands they’re sitting out fucking you with stars. nest of mysterious sun. the girls we loved. asleep. you instead say, stay, i look for you, you, you in rootblood. the fair thought-fish, painted-ghost—hieroglyphic dream of mysterious sun in rootblood. the fucking on and ever clutch a dream like love ever asleep. you in roots and nest of sun in roots and place, tangled-in, but older. the same eventualities, laughing off of my fucking stars. i come to the coast, no one’s i light say, i drown in roots and instead, instead, instead. i stood lookout with tears. i come to understand blood. loved. asleep. you instead. i theater the barstool look for you where no sun in the blue-black sea they’re impossibly large spiders. i say, i dream of a mysterious man in a good mood. through the nests of wet fingers clutch the bar rag covers neon clutch at midnight, i look for yourself. good. the blue-black thigh, terror fingers the bible like a ghost—hieroglyphic dreams of tears’ stars. nests of example; eventually the fucking stars. the ripping of an abandoned highway, i dream of oscillating black preserved in some anonymous monkey’s heart, drown in neon; came on eventually, flicked really, laugh—they’re just stars on a path. flare of mysterious roots now love asleep—you, subsumed by coast.


Source: Kennedy, Christopher. “I Called Shotgun When You Died.” NY Tyrant, Tyrant Books, 11 Jan. 2019, magazine.nytyrant.com/called-shotgun-christopher-kennedy/.

Poem after Personals in The New York Review of Books (Soumettre à une Interrogation)

Wikipedia Poem, No. 798

soixante-dix

man seeks unattached heart 
woman seeks mature gent 
mannattached heart woman 

seek/soumettre

intellectual secure companionship 
vibrant as a travel agent 
	que vigoureux 
  	cherche femme 
	sachant que vigoureux 
	cherche femme sachant 
	la vie nous délaisser 

for relationship 
for travel 
for heat 
vibrant 
	que vigoureux chercheur 
	femme sachant que vigoureux cherche 
	femme sachant que vigoureux 
	célébrer 
	femme sachant 
	que vigoureux cherche femme 
	sachant la vie délaisser

active kind 
	avocat new yorkais 
	soixante dix 

ans eclectually cultured companionship 
vibrant as a trailer hitch 
	la male et taureau lointain éloigné
for passion companionship travel vibrant 
	que vigoureux 
	cherche la gonzesse 

la la la
	whoa whoa whoa
		la vie nous quitte

How to Raise a Premodern Family

Wikipedia Poem, No. 743

JMG_1298-3
Suicide’s Remix (branch6) (work in progress) Joseph M. Gerace

                  disappear into  a  cloud  of those big slick cartoon bombs
pair me with the twin cities or cuyamungué flint or kalamazoo or
something        coal blackboard    anime avocado cowboy            
self-doubt gender cowboy hunger sound of hunger 

to the best of your recollection       how fast
was the joke? a revolution? an iphone? (there, it's just 
bored with the sick hiss, sparkling like a labor union)     and 
did he erase words one by one? 
sparkle me on the sick risk of memory

somewhere, it's january. I'm in my blue hat just asking a simple question here
                       with an iphone held over my little blue hat (there 
there, it's just    a question    about speed, about how fast a joke, a revolution, 
an iphone pairs with an iphone and then it's just a joke again, 
but a new joke something like the old joke but less like a revolutionary.) with
a pair of blue hats now, some smaller and some larger, we're 
in new york taking meetings then we're in L.A. — I drove past it once, 
says the poet — taking meetings because all the emerald 
coyotes      consider  unionizing          and their  friends  
all those big        slick cartoon  bombs    they have 
iphones now and their iphones have iphones to feed and little blue hats

Bernadette

bern

 

I sit in bed beside you, shearing,
Heating pad set to medium;
You say I couldn’t handle more.

You’re looking for work.
I’m reading about poets in
Monochrome.

Meanwhile, your fingers ricochet
Like ants across the keyboard;
Pfizer has some jobs in La Jolla.

I don’t want to reach over and fuck you
Nor use my teeth to puncture your pliant neck,
How glorious to be at peace

Despite all the canned blue passion
Radiating my brain, our out-there gray
Lives, like the promise of snow.

Pain always produces logic, which is
very bad for you. That’s not my line
But it’s a good one and applies here;

Women are bred for pain, they’ve got it
In them. The trick is to realize not everyone
You think is a woman is, my friend. It is dark

Now. The weather report predicts snow overnight
And it is rare the weather report is wrong
Anymore. Four to six inches. This poem

Is about fucking. Or not fucking. Or refusing
To write in bedclothes
with blood.

‘Do you need some more right ears, David?’

dublin

do you need some more right ears david?
insert this monkey’s jaw in the space between
the ridge of the ear and the skull? (what is the
name of this extra-hard portion of skull? place
yourself behind the eyes of the croaking
at the bottom of the well y’all read that
dystopian joint, right? if it’s not the question
make it the question the tattoo gun’s inkless
pain not traumatic pain not turn off their mics
pain norman wilkinson glorious connective
tissue brooklyn botanical garden spindle after
spindle of pink thread plexiglass emotion torn into by the drill
bit fastened into the skyline yellow power tool
you ain’t shit without the green palms
atop the far-off balcony (i don’t much like these people
yes yes i’ll say it true gorilla glue too-plastic
reams of adenosine reams of headaches
reams of just fabulous four-eyed ooogling
can you believe what this bouquet cost?

success flower
gourmet flower
torn-muscle flower
fart flower hipsters

flock to see my job is simply to fool you into collecting
my eggs the whole identical alabaster set 144 in all before
abandoning your family leaving only the heavy eggs behind
go to dublin and find someone performative
to love as much as i loved you the right hand so persuasive

Monadnock

Wikipedia Poem, No, 691

w691-final-small

      in some countries hair 
pilcrow blossom falls 
  
     she is you remember that
a good husband avoids 
     a cross 
 
time bothers neither alluvial husband nor empire 
husband nor backwoods 
husband 

nor line them up on my own thread
      across 
      time 

      i return to my 
collapsing honey-clings to my 
    life my wife that white refusee there and not 

      the first time staring beautiful you said a fistful 
of memories    you covetously       
          having 

         never 
been inside 
my mind 

    9.4% alc/vol my lips do not behave 
like the good husband nor the quiet car 
away from the 

        aerosol 
kudzu 
that honey-pillow goddess pun