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II. Mingus and the end of April
The little tongues of the rain tap
flatly on the umbrella top before you collapse
the thing in the diner, one look
and you see that here
the safest meal is always breakfast, always
dawn or dusk without the life
between. The waitresses here
wear white. You shake the umbrella
like a soaked dog, all rolling flesh
and shot coins of wet, the speeding
and the slowing down.
the door shuts abruptly behind you
like a memory you shut out
leave outside of closed things
water turning to dark stains on your shoulders
spotting you among the crown you eat for forgiveness
a bit more delicate than they would if all alone
waitresses pour coffee never giving you time to empty what you
have
they leave before the morning from your rented bed
having no more time unraveling the drops of living
straight no chaser.
The cemetery vodka fords your chin in
excess, despite what the throat takes down. Some
inner bloom of flesh. You open your eyes
for anchor
and the print on the wall of the diner
a Basquiat scrawl of the inferno, yellows
and chaos and children’s hands
folded into themselves.
You eat little your hole is never full
There hasn’t been a time where you remember being in a garden
somewhere without concrete
the shadows you created down inside the hiss of the city streets, no
chaser just the absolute loneliness there inside the sound of the
rain on the streets that hissing of loneliness being alone in a crowded diner a place where people are buried, a cocktail hour blooming in the hissing of the streets going up down across
II. Mingus and the end of April
The iron wolf walks the desert at night. the oven is warm with the stars. I
share the same birthday as mingus and sinatra and
the weight of judgement, a brakeman's repair
that cannot stop the wheel or until we are done
and eat the words choking the aspirations of the living
dead. The rise of Theodore Roosevelt rivaled
the sparrow's extended appendage bent knuckle on the ground
Dylan Thomas reciting Shakespeare and Caesar once again rises
like Apollo's chariot, but fails at the weakness of just being a story
where childhood crashes and foxes run into the night
and the animated women have eyes too large and impossibly
small noses to sniff the life out of you and you let them
over and over again living like a cat, an alley cat, an oily, tough alley cat
and what do you care anyway about things
about the things you thought to know yesterday
but now, what now, your open hands, the hiss of the streets
the toothless grin of evil and carefree thought bubbles above
their heads like they weren't absent afterall like
illproportioned figures and writing your name on a
grain of rice. Write the ten greatest poems and name them.
find the five greatest jazz songs. Socrates is sand and the old leaders
are slowly dying because they had no sense to pass laws to clone themselves in public. The showers still come, the feature on her face when she lit her foreign cigarette, collapse the darkness, to beauty of why we live,
why we are still trying. Email your dogtags and take your fish
for a walk. For the single moment that brings the manyness of the whole
to a point. You should be so lucky.
Belarus, Belarus! You are dying!
And words don't come so freely
And words sometimes don't come. She takes the room with her
when she left.
Reach for your lighter
Always have a lighter Iron Wolf
There are hunters approaching the valley
Where are you, I don't know what you
are talking about, all facecard stumble and laughable
bluff. Really. Bite the entrails of the predator
like you're not a vegetarian, not
so fast, take that same lighter
and write your name across the canvas
of skin.
President McKinnley was shot dead
He was voted in by the majority when America was expansive
Marx wrote something for you
you have never written him back.
He expressed his disappointment over a sausage
and some coffee downtown. The sausage was predator
entrail and so it was then I knew.
the nurse with the head like a saucer
and the air that explodes with
the sheets unwashed
the young lady I cannot find. The
swollen joints the expectation
unmet, how the summer
descended
upon winter and the declining
sun. The years unwanted while
the desire to dance
undiminished. It's enough
to put a bullet into tissue
already, never enough
courage to live
fully. I cannot
take care of myself
alone
a piano, piano like an airplane impossible
to hear until the next note passes
like when expectation is a wasted cigarette on the sill of white
she won't give me one no not anymore
and points me o'view the garden and leaves when I need someone
to change me
to imagine the blue smoke whisper
from lips too thin
to speak, the bedpan is full, the
gargoyle leers in nursing whites in the screaming moment
passed, the lifetime
spent blowing the trumpet in
failure, the
attention unfound, the genius in the quartet
that couldn't
draw. The nurse has nails that bend
about their edges in purple
thank god Paris ninety feet to base
you have to be tough to get old Paris but you
still haven't returned, the winter sycamore is heaving in the wind of tail lights outside outside the velvet drapes
Spare me these moments
The colossus we think we are, entirely
The clouds move through red banners across the bay.
The colossus in us in millions of marching lines
and each pressed note on ivory, on steel on water
such moments should be easy, my dear caretaker
as easy
as bearing witness the spider crawling on the
sheets closing in
on everything unassailable.
It is enough
he is surrounded in the unnatural world
of lights electric current fabrics that stick
anything to get inside himself to go mad by getting out
his machine cannot stick together during the lunar
eclipse, pissing out the wine on a bush in its shade
the forever stimulant
incomplete in its allover
nothingfall.
The buzz of everything moving
at once like the collapse of
computers crashing together, the sound of
all & nothing
like the fall of Muhammad Ali
this song could deliver us.
Like
scripture given the first man
the child of god given
everything eventual
everything in his fingers unnatural
the way we think
in winter there is sunshine somewhere
and women bathing with oils.
On the other side of our eclipse
he sticks to the highway and in his thoughts
are all of us as he wonders
how the stars must have looked
before the electric light, were there actual angels
looking after us near the scent of rare incense?
That scent rising
like the dead upon the bad religion,
the reek of hypocrisy in action versus
philosophy. How Jung battled
how water is the adaptation of what is given. The carp know
the difference. They know
what is running from versus
to, the life and death there in the circuits
of endless possibility, the why in
the warmth of flesh to flesh
all religion inside each slither of joint and contorting spleen
as it controls the heart on the night you
became something in her arms sparking
that synapse that likes to be snapped
of the turning earth blasting deeper into the universe
as she walked the surface with
faces down, focused on the screen
with too much going on. The overstimulation of the
dream. We cannot maintain the regular.
Men in their 40’s will jump from windows bare
upon the revolution
that nothing is sacred, nothing
means what is given unless taken equally
the carp in his head banging against the concrete
supported by swirling conduits during a storm
or at certain times of the day or night
when equal comes the balance
where there are no shadows
no shallows
no ripples in our water.
Badinfinity, the Hegelian term given life and a second name through Sartre (bad faith), is the soulnumbing modern experience of civilization given bureaucracy in the digital age. These poems are pointed and moving, a singular voice in the white noise that surrounds us.
The Stranger is Tobias Deehan’s second work of poetry with guerillalit, and finds him stretching the boundaries of the poetic form in both aesthetics and language. Also features some work by fellow writer Eugene Ellsworth.
