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Baffler Archives: Poems

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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 ...

When in Rome
No, I will not fondle you willingly centurial world nor stroke your shred of decency, I hold no candles or so you broadcast, ever since you kissed my world weary decadence. Hey soldier, go flaunt your swags and jabots elsewhere this girl is bowing out, full to the glands with ...

Dire Choir
Life diplodocuses. Monday crouches against the nerwherwell of Sunday and we spring to action, workers on the grand backward-dashing conveyor. There are nightcrawlers, big tough ones, moving across the darkened firing-range toward targets of silhouette men, heart areas blown ...

The Theory of Subtlety
January 10, 2013
… a beautiful theory, killed by a nasty, ugly little fact. —Thomas Henry Huxley … then there is this scene in “Alien,” where evil attaches its slimy self to an unsuspecting crewman’s face, wrapping its tail around his neck for traction, sticking its space thang down ...