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Baffler Archives: Poems

Columns

December 2, 2002
January 24, 2013
As it happens every night beloveds, while we turned in the night sleeping uneasily the world went on without us. While we turned sleeping uneasily at least ten were injured in a bomb blast in Bombay and four killed in Palestine. While we turned sleeping uneasily a warehouse of ...

Park American Dream
January 23, 2013
At the park of unexploded ordnance and by-products of enriching uranium: The everglades do all they can, do your best to recall your ticket and what brought you out of your home. Was it the child or a local celeb? The big pin on his shirt & Bonzo? A miniature greenback with ...

Idle Music is the Devil’s Band
This is how I learned to stop hating the smug and arrogant, complicit folk inside the rampant suburban ubiquitous vehicles. This is how I taught myself that my hatred of their crass lifestyles of mobile and sanitized sport and corporate offices burned more energy than ...

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 ...