the mastery of the ten thousand words

Sunday’s symphony.

Across from me we have a cacophony of light bulb
a proliferation of exclamation, of “I love you’s”
but there is no love lost, no opportunity cost.

Frozen peas can’t replace mommy’s love, no doubt I have
but your cleavage is making a commendable effort.
You reek like beer and three day old underwear and I don’t mind.

I’m mostly thinking about the waking up anyhow.
“How now, brown cow,” you say to me, and I’m disinclined to
disagree. I’m fully armed and you’re one foot in the grave.

Let’s mince words, lets burn the farmhouse of conventional love to the ground
we don’t have to stop for anyone, we don’t need no emergency break.
You and I we can run it forever if we want but sometimes you got to sleep.

Don’t pull off the highway here there are no johns in Lynchburg
only these bizarrely inviting arboreal apparitions begging for justice
of a kind un-balanced before the blindfolded momma of America.

The knowledge of a thousand and ten strong-minded men held back by only
a simple push and twist plastic saves lives bottle to prevent the dissemination
of possible destructive factual explosives and other secrets of the literate.

Spastic clay-faced clowns parade their balloon dog men across the crosshairs
while patriotism sits in the witness stand swearing left and right wearing the flag
like a diaper and holding a sack of bald eagles in one hand and saluting with the other.

Neo-Geo liberalism invokes clauses of old Eastern European bloc traditional contracts
that obligates the proletariat to activate their escape pods and blow the porcelain seals off
into the far reaches of turned-off televisionscape and simultaneously hide in the closet.

Deep cover deep throat deep chasms in Kentucky serve as illustrations of the nature of the landscape of the politico, inc. methodology, warning signs facing backwards so we can revel in our own mistakes as we repeat them like high fives on a merry-go-round.

Fat lard filled egg-o-tron 5000 prepackaged breakfast love shot down like a bolt from above while we read the death toll ticker that relates to no disaster in particular as it
floats off towards the network insignia into the land of forgotten trivia and bad dreams.

sometimes we find them under rocks in the forest

Andrew S)iskind


Poetry, for me, seems to be several things all at once; an

intersection of various points in time, space, and emotional expanse

that coexist in the arrangement of units (as here (letters, numbers, handsigns,

words, etc) on the face of a page. There is a tension in poetry that is

the result of multiple presences, diametric opposites even,

maintaining a tenuous balance – what I mean to say is, poetry needs

to have both levity and gravity in each individual moment, so that

each component can float up into your mind, then fall (or rather

plummet like a cartoon piano) down into your heart and soul.

Poetry pulls both ways, and(rew d(raws living
sketches)) while it pulls it also

pushes, lifts and crushes, builds and destroys, illuminates and confuses,

ad infinitum, et cetera, et cetera, Amen et goodnight.

Like all art, it is something like a cross between demonic possession

and cabinetry. It is eagles falling from heaven, but more importantly

it’s also the memories of your childhood. It’s memories you

haven’t made yet. Poetry is the (crockery in the) recipe for

nostalgia, even for places you have not been. Lightning bolt-nighttime

razor blade multifaceted diamond wheel of infinity. The perfect un-

wisdom that cuts through the void. Poetry is the difficulties of

metacognition. It is the wall we build. It is also the sledgehammer.

This is a poem for you.