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Baffler Archives: Poems

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Pablo Tac (1822–1841)
“Thus we lived among the woods until merciful God freed us of these miseries through Father Peyri and seven Spanish soldiers.   In the Mission, the Fernandino Father is like a king. He has his pages, majordomos, musicians, and horses by the thousand.   They made ...

Excerpts from “In Pieces”
September 06, 2021
Tone Deep   No sound is less than a sound or more. But music keeps us from hearing each one by itself. Says John Cage. It is a pity. No mother tongue unless a mother. Or many books demanding we enter their superb monotony. What tongue would not allow us to say you in the ...

more than sex, I miss the movies
 The dreams of lonely boys start there, hemmed with glass and splashed with light and distance.     The screen feels too close in my bedroom as I boot up a romantic drama while I roll a pair of cousins     and I smoke them in the ...

A Perichoresis
In the South we raise a Godhead through questioning What city, what ward, what street?   Houston: a midwife, a first kiss, a celibate sky New Orleans: my father and mother return Baltimore: an endless bay that carries my son   or another way to say any port in the ...

Not Blind
No it isn’t. But love took one of my eyes for itself, love had vision before birth, did discuss with me the accuracy of what transpires in lenses.   And then it went blind—slowly soaked us up from behind a veil, and we couldn’t see it.   A deaf air said to ...

The Correct Approach
Eloquently they spoke, those ancients— briefly, and with a shine. Their thoughts had little wings attached to them, like Hermes’. (You remember Hermes? You don’t remember Hermes. So, see they have no wings, these your thoughts.) As for ancients, they could care less if ...

with walter benjamin in queens
You can’t make a new man but you can kill old ones Walter Benjamin in Moscow 1927 noted posters exhorting the masses with the slogan “Time Is Money” attributed to Lenin the only god the lazy Russians masses pretended to listen to but did not no matter how big Majakovski ...

textinction
something I made up in the mirror of enmeshed languages survived briefly then died in my lifetime   it was poetry it was art it was the ineffable stench of a dying world   I speak two human languages each one mirrored by its twin and followed by its echo   each ...

2020
When I was a child I had no trouble destroying the world with mind-rays. The neighbors who communalized our kitchen. The empty ghost-houses in the overgrown bushes behind the crumbling cement walls where ghouls screeched. The stepfather who wrestled my dog Nemo out of my ...

What I Saw at a Frozen Creek
shallow enough, close to thaw, the ice beginning to fissure like latticework bowed: a teensy fish, tadpole maybe, wiggling in place, its Labradorite carapace glinting prismatic an hour before dusk— striving to be from some untold laze, petrified midstride through the numinous ...

Unto Ourselves (1)
Firs trembled at the edge of a massive debris flow in the asphalt-heat of summer just between you and me, said the field guide in an undertone leaning forward, you have to get beyond the expectation that you’re ever going to pull things together it was a queer thing to say in ...

Unto Ourselves (2)
Even when we realized we’d stopped, in every essential way stopped moving forward, when we came to see we were descending, even more tightly bound to the vortex as images rushed by in front of us and a blue whale rotted on the sand in Bolinas, its stink drifting southward ...