(for David Lynch)
You’re someone’s favorite song,
a needlepoint dialogue stitched into their heart.
You, too, can channel photons into a tidal wave of despair.
You do not need permission to excavate your secret joy.
To build everything is your birthright.
When you’re gone they’ll hang pieces of you in a museum.
Tour guides will direct their attention:
“This is the scar from trying to jump a fence when he was twelve.”
“This is the temperature of their forehead after three hours of dancing.”
“This is the color of her iris when she saw her beloved for the first time.”
High schoolers will grind you into powder and snort you.
Ants will be inspired by your temerity and begin to unionize.
Adults will stroll past and find themselves aging in reverse.
Flies will enter your orbit and have heart attacks.
Perception is, in fact, our only responsibility.
There will be roadblocks
(wooden sawhorses, really,
firewood in disguise),
officious directives to stop,
to be serious,
to forget.
In exchange for a smallpox blanket,
you will be asked to stub yourself out like a two-drag cigarette.
Don’t.
You must let go of the anguished belief that your life should have turned out differently.
You are free, and therefore dangerous.
This clown college choir needs your voice,
and the chord we hum in unison can sink battleships.
If.
Author: Troy Coll
I-10 High Rise Bridge
They could have built
anything.
They built me:
one hundred and fourteen feet high
six lanes of concrete and rebar
soaring over the Industrial Canal
as natural as a donkey in a lab coat.
From my peak you can see
everything.
The skyline of
the world’s northernmost banana republic.
The Superdome.
The river, whose tranquil permanence
fills me with envy.
A quilt of flapping blue tarps
and subsidized solar panels.
A baby or two has entered the world
while passing across me. Birds
have long enjoyed nesting in my girders
and there are some tough fucking turtles
in that canal.
But I’ve seen more death
than anything else.
I tasted blood for the first time
on December 17th, 1966.
A truckload of drunk fishermen
about to miss the Downman Road exit
sideswiped a sedan
carrying a mother and two children.
I drank them all up
like a six-pack of Dixie.
I bore witness
as they strategically distributed
the consequences of their actions
among the least of themselves.
I watched fertilizer runoff
thicken the Gulf
into a turbid bowl of gumbo
saw the Gulf eat
into the coastline
like termites
turning their maps into lies.
I watched the Army Corps of Engineers
throw together some slapdash bullshit
and call it a levee,
knowing exactly which neighborhoods
would be decimated when it failed.
I saw those flood walls crumble
when Katrina whaled into them.
Six days later
I watched
still as the September sun
while seven New Orleans Police Department officers
drove up the Danzinger Bridge
in an unmarked box truck
armed with AK-47s
as honorable as pirates
as civil as coyotes.
I saw them jump out in street clothes
to face
their neighbors.
Their neighbors
who had been abandoned to drown
abandoned by a nation
that was happy to use their bodies
for war
for wage labor
for imprisonment
now looking for lost family members
looking for food
looking for water.
They murdered James Brissette
a seventeen year-old boy.
They murdered Ronald Madison
a forty year-old developmentally disabled man.
They shot him in the back.
All seven of those officers are walking free.
Ronald and James are still dead.
Things are winding down.
They’ve stopped the music
and turned the lights up in America.
After sixty years
of watching them
speed distractedly through
the miracles that surround them
I have no expectation of care
no illusions of longevity.
They could have built
anything.
They inherited
all the accumulated wealth
of creation
thirteen billion years
of the sun’s blessings
and they decided
to set it on fire.
They invented Keurig cups.
They invented ghost fishing.
They fed it to leaf blowers.
They sprayed it out of riverboat-mounted flamethrowers.
They turned all that promise
into trash
and noise
and wind
and death.
They could have built
anything.
They chose this.
take me with you, big homie
(for Hanif Abdurraqib)
What’s good, big homie?
Me, I’m just trying to find a way to stay with it.
Just trying to crack the shell
that separates us.
Just trying to be a fabric sample
of the softness that will save us.
We can do so much better than holding on, big homie.
There’s more space than that. Stop scrunching yourself.
Stop shrinking yourself. Stop eggshell-stepping
in your own damn house.
Lemme rephrase the question:
which desires do you have shame over?
It’s cool to care, big homie. To let it be
important to you, to let it be risky.
God has fucked around
and made you too powerful.
Keep showing up, keep noticing
the constant becoming.
Open wide and let it filter through you
prismatic and warm.
Nobody’s stopping you but
you, big homie.
Get in there
like swimwear.
Just say it.
Say it how it feels, how it hums
like a tuning fork.
That’s plenty, big homie.
That’s all you can do.
There is no opting out, big homie.
You cannot omit a single part of it
without changing all of it.
Fuckin butterfly effect, big homie.
All mistakes are the fulfillment of a secret wish.
All mistakes bring you one step closer
to what you need.
All of this was inevitable.
Friction is the only way to make fire, big homie.
Slow down, big homie.
Come back.
Walk with me.
Life is so incredibly long
how many times
we can be met
and known
and parted
and forgotten.
That sunshine you asked for is on the way, big homie.
Lemme rephrase the question:
what do you yearn for?
The yearning,
big homie,
the yearning is the point.
the purpose driven life
To till the soil. To cause a scene. To be the cause of something. I’m scared all the time. To be less alone in my fear. To cook in cast iron, and confide in its dark porosity. To celebrate the interval between our unbeings. Because survival is insufficient. To find what’s hidden between the blades of grass, in the breaths between kisses, the empty mouth after swallowing. To search the crawlspace for vermin and their filthy children, and to cherish them, take their picture, show it to strangers at the airport terminal.
To figure this out. We can figure this out. Just keep talking to me.
To be digested. To shoot and leaf and bud and blossom, to bee and pollen and yellow and fall, and twig and snap and rot and silt. To be carried, swept elsewhere, slurped up, pissed out. To re-enter, to exit again. How long was I a puddle of goose shit on a matte black slate?
To ask questions like, “what’s the point?” To ignore the correct answers and try something stupid. To patch holes in the drywall. To weep, to wax indignant, to cease all efforts at understanding. To be pliable, to circle the same spot three times like a dog before lying down. To polish an old mirror until the lines in your face stand out like the bunched carpet of Appalachia. To mourn everything and everyone we’ve lost. We’ve lost so much and so many but I still have you and I promise, you still have me.
To finally see what’s been in front of us all along. And then to look away.
To find the unblemished holiness in every inch of it.
To stop looking away.
is it safe for dogs to eat
asparagus?
silvery snakes bashed into the sidewalk?
shame?
hot Cheetoes?
old solutions to new problems?
libertarianism?
Eastern Standard Time?
anti-natalist literature?
Nutella pancakes?
gratitude at the ability to feel anything at all?
emails from Cyclebar that arrive well after death?
legacy admissions to Ivy League universities?
three falcons, hunting?
egg salad?
an unhinged desire to be the sun?
consequential violation of unjust laws?
Herman Hesse’s secret from the river?
elegiac poetry?
raisins?
serendipitous loss?
AI-generated art criticism?
intolerable pain?
nag champa incense cones?
the baseless dichotomies of
sun and leaf,
man and beast,
self and other,
savior and saved?
devil’s cartwheel
Uncertainty, come and sit in my lap.
Close the circuit of pleasure
between us, let me
rub the small of your back, let me
stroke the shocking fuzz of your electric fur*,
let me fry you a pork chop, let me
watch your face change shape, watch me
tear you open like a Christmas gift.
Uncertainty, I have some questions for you:
Who was it that licked the sweat off my skin?
What is it that pain demands of us?
When I thought it was pudding but my mouth surprised me with ketchup and I gagged.
Where the hell did all of my dread go?
Why am I writing when I could be lying face-up in this here creek?
How is there always just enough?
What’s mine?
What’s yours?
What can we share?
Everything?
Is that not self-obliteration?
Is it not heaven?
Uncertainty, come and sit in my lap. Or better yet,
let me sit in yours. Or better yet,
put a dog collar on me,
feed me peanut M&M’s by hand, come with me
to co-sign a lease
on a brand new car.
Peel me like a grapefruit.
We are common-law married and
you’re never leaving
so I might as well make room
for you in my chest,
zip you up in my favorite hoodie,
buy you a toothbrush.
Uncertainty,
your breath stinks.
*e.e. cummings, “i like my body when it is with your body”
pledge of allegiance
Free as in undisciplined, as in formless, uncontained. For, meaning intended, the betrothal of cause to effect. All as in “may all beings know peace.” Yes, even him. And yes, even you.
Free from owning and ownership, take a penny leave a penny, dispossessed peoples of an anarchist moon. For you, this gift of grief, this rotten jar of gritty roots, to soften and soothe. All, like the radical unexceptional acceptance of newborns and the dying.
Free like the poem that saved you, like the text that stopped you. For, as in the fellowship of reconciliation, love revealed and interpreted by forgiveness from sin. All, meaning the sum, the just and unjust, the sun abandoning none.
Free as a story, a you-shaped seat at this table of laughter. For as in due to, as in what we owe each other, which is everything. All as in everyone’s invited, barking carnival cattle dogs herding you precious to the hearth of the heart.
Free just like “I made you some tea,” like my hand is held by yours as my freedom is wrapped up in yours. For, which asks: how long must we wait? All like many, meaning pluralistic pluperfect presence, the indivisible prime number of universal personhood.
Free, meaning not alone, all patches in the quilt and threads in the sweater and holes in the net. For we know not the miles between this world and the new one. All like one, which is what we are, which is all there is which is neither yes nor no but both and and.
Free meaning decriminalized liberty, bound and bonded to brother-sister-siblinghood for the why which is and cannot be anything but love and love and the inexpressible unbounded inequivalent irreplaceability
of all.
beat the clock
I was trying to save time. I ate
the canned soup. I bought my panic in bulk.
I outran the moon, she couldn’t keep up.
I doubled my body. We worked as a pair.
We velcro’d our sneakers. We cut our own hair.
While frothing the solvent of business and pleasure,
I got pulled over for texting and driving,
pausing the mindfulness podcast on 2x speed.
“Sir,
you need
to slow down
Now.”
I’m trying to make time. I’m
s t r e t c h i n g
a minute
like a ham hock in greens.
I’m walking.
I’m talking.
I’m reading out loud. Stepping
out of the office
and into the river (there is
only one). Steeping
mint that I swiped
from the Garden of Eden.
Folding the batter
of motion
and stillness.
It’s three minutes
to midnight:
do you know where your breath is right
Now?
How many heartbeats escape your attention?
The space in between them:
does that count as
Death?
I made some time,
for you.
Here,
take it.
Open the box
that contains a box
that contains a box
that contains a box
that contains
your candle,
lit at both ends.
Blow it out.
Breathe it in.
Now,
cough.
hangin’ in there
Sounds precarious.
What’s below?
Sun-warmed earth,
covered
in moss,
waiting
for me
to let go.
“The discourse around poetry has a bit of a joy problem.”
(for Jad Abumrad)
We try to shoot a bouquet from our sleeve,
out comes a broom. The rabbit shits in our hat. We
hack softshoe, rocking a terrified chimpanzee rictus,
spangly leotard riding up asscrack. We plead:
laugh with us, laugh at us,
scream, cry, throw up, please just feel anything.
Feel everything.
We get in the lab. Rabbits have two kinds of shit, one that they leave,
one that they eat.
Posing hypotheses, our theories like toddler shoes,
good for 8-12 weeks.
We control+F for certainty: this search returned no results. Eyes tuned microscopic,
developing a live-virus vaccine against despair.
We Bunsen.
We Beaker.
They Statler and Waldorf.
Huddle up, team. They are dragging our asses on Podcast Twitter.
They said we’re soft and serious, we’re velvet waistcoat.
They said it’s not that deep, it is what it is,
all the famous poets are dead, better learn a TikTok dance.
They’ve got an AI Walt Whitman with cat whiskers singing open-mouth dialup modem.
They could give a fuck about a red wheelbarrow, who ate whose plums.
If it doesn’t nick an artery, they ain’t got time for it.
We got this, though.
We’ve all been poets since before we were born.
The first words were a poem and the first poem was a dirge
a linen bandage stuffed into a sucking chest wound. We play placebo paramedics,
first aid and last rites. Cyclic and cryptic, cicadas birthed from the dirt,
if not for our drumming they’d forget how to sing.
Let’s stop dicking around:
What is poetry for?
What is a blowtorch for?
To light a blunt.
To burn down your own home.
To scatter the wolves past the edge of the campsite.
To weld a monument to heaven.
To weld a monument to heaven.
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