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Baffler Archives: Poems

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After Rejection
Everyone in my photo collection Looks as if they’re saying “Don’t point that thing at me” So I screen all calls from friends But answer when salesmen and creditors call To indulge my many hang-ups I write polite letters to Tommy Hilfiger Imploring him to make more baggy ...

Junk
Why is the midnight rain So much more soothing Than a dripping sink? Though downward stains Of rust are how we think To cling to life sometimes Oxidized by pleasure We’re metallic to the bone Easily bent, or stretched thin As wire, conducting heat by breath alone The torture ...

Columbo in San Cristóbal
January 18, 2013
People he told the truth to didn’t trust him brained by a frying pan & “just woke up there” Without a tale to tell to death or nail to hang his hat on— thus we honor Amerigo Merry-go-round to the right of the roadside shrine to the saint of dead bugs Later, sitting ...

Mount Capon Comes to Bozo
January 17, 2013
A water wagon rides into town nobody from the waist down some body’s moved to the Mirage Club captivity underscores the strangeness of this life we’ll believe like chickadees almost any seed and tanked up on Pike’s Magnolia Shriveler hung like a horse of a different color ...

Autographeme
A thought on the lip of little sand island, an easy messenger who forgot where to go. I came to laugh in a dirty garden, a thwarted pauselessness considering pearls. I was fluent in salamander. Everything wrote itself onto skin with a tangled blowing. Identity washed its ...

Some Days in the City
January 16, 2013
Some days, the sky descends to the level of mid-thigh water the clock-hands come loose, and language is a skiff over land through the rhythm of your breathing, girl then I can hear the pink oriole, the body is a metronome of blood and syllables beating placentas of speech and ...

A Semi-permissive Environment
My model personality Slams into the side of a bus Trained to obliterate or hide He was suspect of the mother &; father; could move a whole Madness while banking on good Relations. At shutter speed Not a soul notices candor Becoming manipulation I contain ...

Powerslave
January 15, 2013
Large crowds gather in late industrial style: Austin, MN; Peoria, IL; Flint, MI. Quantrill’s corporate raiders and John Brown’s ghost. DNA marketplace and love for sale, love on the rocks. Starting a new life on her father’s South Dakota farm. Sallow August afternoons, ...

In Readiness
January 15, 2013
A geography for your character can be learned only after the blind cord frays. I feel impatience, a gift perhaps, but when applied in retrospect only a small comfort brought hence across a footbridge, over carelessly spaced boards. As if expecting a lamp to be lit by someone ...

Rue des Blanc Manteaux
January 15, 2013
Certainly objects—places—writhe with uncertainty, Not ours about them but their own. Promiscuous colors, The summer truths. He was in love with yellow but unfaithful With blue every chance he got. The sun kept the dayjail, The nightjail had no keeper at all—his eyelids ...

Not the town
January 15, 2013
as in a colonial outpost local do-good cablers on pass-the-microphone-tv make Rimbaud’s “oxidize the gargoyles” sound like the butler in the “Red Dwarf”— not the town, the walls, are painted red for years & years the households suffer bloated ill-temperament, the ...

Early Poem
“How’s everything in Sunny Vale?” —Bill Lluoma My dad would always come home from his job at the IG Farben (Reichold Chemicals really) & ask, “How’s every thing in Sunny Vale?” some- times it would become “Happy Dale” but i think it was always some ...