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Baffler Archives: Poems

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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 ...

Glitter
January 14, 2013
Another fuckwit drops into the dustbin of history, just as we’re finishing our coffee. Some of us are meant to burn out, is that right? Like roman candles, across the night sky. I want to go up like a tree, not a rocket, I’d like to get drunk disgracefully with a favorite ...

Event
January 13, 2013
to be happy to be afraid to flee the atmosphere is metaphysical to be sad to stop to dash joyfully to reverse the future is anatomical reversed combined solidified its its or its are the all is fantasy (damn Miss Tickle!)

18 1/2 Minute Gap
If there wasn’t this interference I could make myself perfectly clear and the one who wants such clarity would certainly be happy if statues could be happy and maybe they can (laughter) because each one of us has to identify with a statue sometimes (or else there’d be no ...

Metaphor to Action
Whether it is a speaker, taut on a platform, who battles a crowd with the hammers of his words, whether it is the crash of lips on lips after absence and wanting : we must close the circuits of ideas, now generate, that leap in the body’s action or the mind’s ...