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Baffler Archives: Poems

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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 ...

Vigilance
A pen against the force-field of reflex. Rapid weather. Old wounds. The tasks of air. Apart from sex, a lucky charm in someone else’s pocket. The hands of biologists. Around the waist, presence is attenuated and the past shows through. Many aptitudes such as shooting never ...

Residual Rubbernecking
September 23, 2012
Press the key you wish to define now. Later, outside, you can say the slosh is softer this year, or mercy loops its own trail, mucking through the triumphant pillars of mastery—moment’s solace, forfeiture’s plenitude. I’d wave my hand maybe four or five times before ...

Interior
September 22, 2012
1. The bleached corpse of the afternoon mutes the surface of my window. Pinned to the wall, a peacock feather pales quietly in its light. Minutes trickle by. Outside, a man presses his face against my door and whispers. Frustrated cars roar and slide around the building. The day ...

Ballad
Zane slaves over a rock ballad, tears on cheek, flared mauve chaps, bullion lips.   two takes, has cigar, calls it a Mayflower nickel, wages, an emotional pilgrimage.   not enough, take ten.   pauses for recall, popular remainders and pulse, a twinkie that belts ...

What She Does Not Understand
September 22, 2012
That I am walking home in a city so old its stone shares substance with its darkness. That loneliness sinks leaden and still older through both. That my throat aches dense to stretch and die strangled on her body. That it cannot swallow her whole.   That towers and walls ...

Song of Her Vomit
September 22, 2012
Out of Victoria endlessly puking, Out of her mockingbird’s throat, the musical splashing, Out of her full-mooned midnight, Over the toilet to the pipes beyond, where the workmen taking their breaks wander’d alone, drinking coffee, smoking, Down from her toothy jawline, Up ...

With This Poem All Things Are Possible
This poem has been sent to you for aesthetic pleasure. The original is in England, but millions worldwide read it faithfully each day. It is not a virus, but an opportunity to gain aesthetic pleasure and pass it along to others. To do this you must pay for and distribute twenty ...