Observations on my time and on the time of my time
It's harder than a dick in spring
to sleep soundly and be a genius
and the pain of wanting to skinny-dip without
thinking of war, without missing violently
the memories of Clintonian years when those we bombed
were somehow less significant, and seemed further away,
is as intolerable as a pink, rosy and innocent rectum
being stuffed with napalm. The reason, however,
that I am going mad with grief in supermarkets while others
drive expensive cars happily over the same cliff
that I am lamenting, must be genetic. Why else
would anyone especially cry out, since everyone is wounded?
And again: It's harder than a nipple under a worshipped tongue
to sleep soundly and be a genius
The diary of Waslav Nijinsky
I'm told that my father went crazy, but he never
wrote any interesting books on the experience,
unlike Nijinsky, whose Diary I always read to re-establish
my own ridiculous semblance of sanity and intelligence,
the earthly version of which I copied from somewhere
less pure and more bookish than the mountain streams
I swam when I was younger than a mosquito in the spring.
Who needs crafted metaphor and image in a world full
of helicopters and pornography? A Vietnam veteran
in a tiny shithole we shared for weeks once said
to me, after hearing me in flaming voice read Nijinsky's diary
out loud from the opposing bunk: The Best Book Ever Written;
I know where this dancer is coming from, he understood
the truth I knew in war and can't forget: god is a sarcastic
bitter motherfucker, not fond of ballet, and this is no new truth.
I'm sorry that
I went to hell and couldn't come back with anything better.
Somewhere on land across rippling sea
a man's hourglass guts fall out onto sand.
I can feel the muffled impact in my sleep.
The ocean smears the sharpness of the bullets.
Soldier stands there staring a minute
before he falls. In one hundred years
nobody will remember. Fuck him.
Someday our sun will explode like a human heart monitored by
flies and nobody will be famous.
Someone with a brain bigger than earth
will suck in their ageless breath
for a supernova full
of angrily quacking ducks and crumbling subways.
Above, the solar bodies writhe with fire; killers don't look
up there until just before they die. Then the tar closes over
them like a dream.
My horny New York neighborhood
is full of fireworks for no happy purpose.
When I think of the explosions flowering flesh my face like a
scab on Something Larger's knee turns purple in the mirror and
my hands forget to pay the rent. I am evicted and live in a hail
of badly-aimed bullets.
Since none of them hit, none can be traced.
Constantly I touch my dick
in front of the firing squad. Between the joys of flesh and its
end, there have always been too many soldiers and not enough strippers.
[END]
© 2006 Luke Buckham - Contributor's
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