Star-Standard Night, Yet the Bottom-Heavy Heavens Are Untenable, Untenable, and We Are All to Be Saved, and We Are All to Be Drenched, and We Are All of Us a Light, a Light, a Fast and Breaking Light and Other Observations
Like ghosties in the omentimes, paranormal proclivity and powerful tired
I walked down the road today wrested a wind with my hip
And tonight can’t even brain my feet awake
Can’t raise the dead from my sternum
Can’t beat a clock that keeps lapping my movements.
Sneakers, laces, pumpkin prints on a walkway
Ashimmer with glassy flecks, the moon
A pallid lime wedge in the sky’s vast gin.
I’d swear I’m being plied with pageantry
But for what? One can’t unstartle history.
Move in the direction of equilibrium, he says.
Who says? In the room the women come and go
Talking of Leo DiCaprio. In Colorado
A snowman ducks a greenhouse gas
By mere seconds, photons swirling in his absence,
There are books about my sleep
I keep on writing them they won’t let me stop
Book one goes dot dot dot
Inconstant wretch, leaky faucet.
Someone pause it.
Posit what? An anvil made of Stonehenge?
A hammering out of dreamspell
Into breath-thin sheets of air?
Folksongs spinning skinny in the sky?
Bareback horizon? Nothing can be done for us,
Not now. Not balled around and played with, like
Butter in a butter dish. Not to walk too fast for thoughts,
Too often fall on monastery stairs,
Not to miss so many teeth, and look, a bee!
Or the eye of my beloved seeing me
Everywhere. Can I get a what what?
What foul, what prayer. I love you too, Sweetums!
Faithful chanting in the deep, in the deep,
In the bear’s den black of deep.
|—|—|———————|—|—|
x x x Black the drums! x x x
And chanting to walk smoothly by. Hie,
Quoth the craven paramour. Across the river
Things get stained. Who is it keeps strewing art
Along the banks of flooding plains?
In the room the women come and go, shouting
We want Leo! We want Leo!
You bade me come here, do you deny it?
You bade me quest the dragon’s head.
You called for it piked on the end of my blade
But my darling, my everything,
My blade is my pen, yet I’m
Mighty parched and partial
To noblesse oblige slash also
Famously in the employ of your enemy
The late Herr Kapitalism. Obey thy father,
Says Father, notorious Dust Bowl sympathizer. Make yon woman
Unto wyf. Only after I sling one more Applebeetini.
Only after the fats seep deep in my brain,
These fragments I have shored against my ruin-
Ous collapse, my mandible swinging squeakily
On its bone-hinge. Remember
That raccoon cap I lost at camp?
That raccoon died for nothing. From Parallels between My Life
And the Story of My Life:
In both stories equally gray
The eaves no leap has sullied black,
The roof a tabula non grata of rain
And rain’s contingency, of mind and razor’s filigree.
Go anywhere, go. What light isn’t thief? Amen.
In the room the women come and go by
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Calm the reader: planish the page.
Kindle the page: tinder then cinders.
Each page an interface between this world
And the world in which my animated avatar-me
Writes and writes ferociously.
Cinders rain good upon our soil bring us bountiful harvests lure the ghosts from
our roots.
Feast and rejoice.
March: These hands were never ours
What groggy music here in the hospital of the cosmos,
Ether toast splayed splendid on the splendid table.
To be scared or not to be—to feast,
To be, wholly, unscathed, as lonely pilgrims
When at their holy place, or always
To know just what to say, and rising.
Notes always rising, but to where? Above,
Where a little bit of sky used to be. A hole,
Its green futilities, illuminati, and look, a boat!
Or the sky’s tattered remains, or no,
A hand, the paper lantern hand of Grandpa God
Playing with his boats in the darkwater sky of night.
Maritime toy—ne’er good for the ambulatory
And the night’s cuffs rolled up as if, what?
Isn’t this 1955? As if wholly old
Or ode, and the night a breath of siren song
Waking us all to drown. Waves adjust.
Waves are just a motion. Flag me down
And the night running guilty in thief’s hood.
March: These hands were never oars
Lo! Hwaet! Hate! Kuwait! Like me love me.
Spin me right round, baby, right round, sing.
Little fishies of fate, your sucked-in faces, your made faces,
Your oxygen gases slushing through sushi knife slits of gills, serenest
Song. Don’t go breaking my heart, you and you and you and
The clock is stuck and it’s again, again. As is my heart.
And the hand? The hand is restless, sates pockets
With pills of white acetaminophen, animates a wave
From behind skies of boats, splays all five fingers out—
Skyward—the green—everyone look up—fireworks!
The women always come and go. Such flight!
Dog, I’ll fool you up real nice. These bones aren’t what you think.
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March: These hands were never hours
Or never had I trodden so lightly on the molten earth,
Stores of energy underfoot, lightfooted
I sang on and on—showtunes!
Classy showtunes—
Micah Bateman lives in Iowa City, where he teaches in the University of Iowa’s School of Library and Information Science. He is the author of a chapbook of poems, Polis (Catenary).