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?
Author: Troy Coll
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.
God gets bored
Eternal life is such a curse.
How many trillions of times
and billions of ways
over multiple millennia
will I have to answer the same whiny fuckin’ prayer:
“Why?”
I should have killed that Job in his crib.
“Why do we age, get sick, and die?”
Because otherwise the worms would starve and y’all’d run out of dirt.
It’s a whole system.
“Why did you let us invent napalm?”
Because my portfolio was underperforming and I overindexed on Dow Chemical.
Even God’s gotta eat.
“Why can’t we all just get along?”
Because y’all keep asking obnoxious questions like, “Is a hot dog a sandwich?”
Because to turn your sorrow into tears
and your tears into rage
and your rage into righteousness
is a daisy chain of miracles.
And because some of y’all are a pack of lies.
Fuck it.
Maybe I’ll spin some tectonic plates, rearrange the continents.
No, they’d just do a colonialism again.
Maybe I’ll send my dirtbag son back down there to shoot dice and flip some tables.
No, they’d probably beat his ass to death with hammers this time.
Maybe I’ll fuck around with the gene pool, get some new species goin’.
No, whenever I try that I just end up with more goddamn crabs.
Maybe I’ll… maybe I’ll…
Maybe I’ll kill Dolly Parton!
“Hard Candy Christmas” is the kid’s favorite birthday song, though,
and out of all the life forms I’ve created, these dumbasses were the first to figure out a croissant.
The fact that they gave Toni Morrison her flowers is a credit to the species,
and I have seen incremental progress
since I stopped speaking to them through burning bushes,
talking donkeys, and burn toast.
I should stick to what I’m good at:
Mississippi thunderstorms,
the opiate relief of canceled plans,
the sun shining down on a newly-divorced woman,
big luscious butts.
I could be nicer to them.
I forget why I made it so hot in the summer and cold in the winter,
and that they rarely figure out what to do with their bodies
until they’re wracked with pain and near decrepitude.
That unless they hold hands, feed each other,
ignore anyone claiming to speak in my name,
live with delusional bravery and spit in my eye,
they’ll never make it.
Maybe those fallen angels have a point.
A Courtesy Notice from the Department of Tortured Metaphors
For your situational awareness:
We will no longer shrink from grandiosity.
We have filled the courtroom with metallic yellow balloons.
All detention centers are being repurposed as oubliettes for childhood malnutrition.
We are artificially enlarging our tear ducts to flood the halls of power.
If you leave for any reason you will have to return again.
Life has more surface area than you have been led to believe.
We are updating our bylaws to require radical assumption of positive intent.
All debts, public and private, have been converted to little powdered donuts.
A blind golden retriever named Patience has been appointed chair of our department,
as the previous chair was indicted for upholding false binaries.
The state is a hammer dripping blood.
In the coming months we will be excising the language of coercion and control in relation to the self.
We have financialized electromagnetism to induce a crash of the attention economy.
Loneliness is undergoing a rebrand as “luxuriating in space.”
Please pardon our progress:
we are repairing and unraveling simultaneously.
Opening any social media application will now direct-dial your dead grandmother.
We are migrating our system of record to an on-premise mycorrhizal network.
Shirtsleeves have been canceled in favor of feeling the rain on your skin.
For further inquiries, please reach out to the first person you see asking for help.
In summary:
the body is not a factory, it is both a tin can telephone to god
and a Dumpster.
wild tomatoes
There has to be a secret to this.
One weird trick that doctors hate.
A memory palace, a mindfulness practice, a murder mystery podcast.
Some way out that isn’t through.
When you find it, let me know.
A secret is a heavy load.
Our soft bodies,
naked to every sting and sorrow,
were not meant to carry this much alone.
While we’re here sharing things, you should know:
I am afraid that the people I love
don’t know that I love them,
that they’ll get tired of helping me
and leave me behind.
Don’t think for a second that you’re special.
You are indistinguishable from the atmosphere.
You are welcome.
There’s beans and rice on the stove,
fix you a plate and sit down.
It’ll be like pulling out thorns you didn’t know were there.
I’ll be the first to admit that the horrors are significant.
There are potholes to fill,
police cars to flip,
lies to retruth,
and maybe a few rotten teeth to pull.
Despite all that,
despite the worry that rocks me to sleep every night,
I knew we were gonna be okay
when I asked my neighbor if he’d seen
the wild tomatoes
growing in the vacant lot on the corner.
desires
To acknowledge the choices that brought us to this moment
To be a jerk in order to be seen
To return, to recede, to return again
To know what the hell these keys are for
To find myself stuck in a fence
To create a container for healing
To verb an adjective object
To hide the answers to my problems in my dreams
To seek the most elegant programmatic solution
To embody the values I profess to believe
To smoothly pendulate from contraction to expansion
To acquire proof of my existence.
Not just letting go, but letting out and letting in.
tacohole dot net 