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Baffler Archives: Poems

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from Book of Conceptual Anarchy
From random atoms floating around the cosmos 14 billion years ago, you have to admit we humans, as a species, have come pretty far. We have this thing we call intelligence, and then this self-consciousness thing. We are pretty much all set, or are we? With this in hand, humans ...

from Book of Conceptual Anarchy, cont’d
The dinosaurs didn’t really do much with their 200 million year reign of the planet except run around and eat each other.       ∞ Don’t be a dinosaur.       ∞ Dinosaurs really didn’t do squat. Well that is not exactly true. I have a piece of coprolite in my ...

Route 202
Somehow we are always back on it, though always it appears to be going a different way­— here, east west; there, north south; anyway the wrong way­—   and there is nothing much to see, mainly the scrawny late-growth woods that famously cover up the ...

Maybe Next Time Around
For Marie   Dogs. Yes, dogs she says, are like angels. No, I say, they are like dogs. It’s 103 degrees. August, church bells banging, cars, voices        of children and parents. Dogs, are better than people, she says. They embody ...

To Be Rid of a Rival
For this curse,       you need a liter of good grain liquor and a heartful       of unquenchable hate. Keep the bottle corked,       and spend a long, dry night thinking of ...

Chemical Life
For example I go back to the twenty-five caged fish dropped into Snow Creek to assess the toxicity of the waters that the infamous chemical company released its wastes into over decades and how all of them, all twenty-five, lost their equilibrium   more or less immediately, ...

Learned
My brain is a baby. And all the ancients are in it still.   My heart is a brain emptied of them.     Both brain and heart need oxygen, one more extremely than the other.   My fourth infant was an orphan who lived between my ears.   Its cries could only ...

Narcissus Tweets
@NarkeHunts Followers 646 Following 0   @Artemis Looked down into the silvered water and there he was. The most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen. I’m in love.   @BrizoSees Had a dream last night—a nymph saying my name over and over. A rock skipped ...

It was the year we turned to dragons
       snaked our way through harsh fields of sunflowers petals landing on us heavy & dirty & we were beginning to lose sense of direction became distracted by time the oblivious faces of sunflowers watching themselves shed become ...

What It Look Like
Dear Ol’ Dirty Bastard: I, too, like it raw, I don’t especially care for Duke Ellington at a birthday party. I care less and less about the shapes of shapes because forms change and nothing is more durable than feeling. My uncle used the money I gave him to buy a few ...