They Don't Kill You Because They're Hungry, They Kill You Because They're Full. Mark Bibbins

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СКАЧАТЬ blown between adjacent bridges

      Whose river had presented us a city

      That was broken

      That we had been

      That we were broken

      That was our city

      This was our city

      that was a song replaying itself in the dark

Confidence

      When a woman comes into the store,

      points at me and says to her child,

      Tell the man what you want, I turn around

      to see where the man is.

      Maybe I will visit him someday

      in the Home for the Wildly Inarticulate,

      for the Destroyed, for the Actual Man

      Standing Where I Cannot Reach Him.

      Don’t expect I’ve seen the center

      of anything, though I have been

      privy to enough insane exchanges

      to do with hygiene. Henceforth I ban you,

      letter-shaped body parts, from

      my purview: our last chat left

      the taste of buckshot in my mouth.

      It’s early again, and late, when the birds

      assume a tone neither mocking

      nor judgmental, but something about

      their exuberance is oppressive

      enough to eat holes in the roof.

      I just make the occasional collage

      that falls apart when it rains,

      wield my plaid umbrella like a sword,

      and charge, exhausted, into the storm.

In Which the Pathetic Fallacy Wants to Even More

      Frankly I don’t follow this

      strategy of yours wherein you

      tell half the people on the island

      you are a barista and the other

      half that you are a barrister

      and they buy it.

      Everyone else

      believes and I continue to serve

      as your wing-man as we snake

      among the aloe spikes.

      You keep me so busy,

      thwarting my every attempt

      to find again a favorite stretch

      of beach, when all I wanted

      was to show you the pirate bar

      with the swings.

      What else

      has prevented me: relatives, railroad

      tracks, paralysis, thickets of killed

      umbrellas, cliffs impossible to scale,

      a weeping jaguar, the fact

      that it was 5:30, squishy brakes,

      money, all my bent

      and voided sleep.

      I wish I had

      some idea but to admit I have

      any at all is to risk that it is full

      of a sad nothing.

      Huge lizards the color

      of banged-up charcoal are shredding

      one another beyond a cluster

      of palms, their hisses curling the flat

      green leaves and then disbanding

      into the waves.

      That’s a surfeit

      of strategy right there but your faith

      is still big enough to fit in a kayak

      that could be drifting in or away.

Desire Loves Disaster

      I should have spoken clearly / made known

      the consequences of not accepting an offer

      even though I offered nothing

      and there were never any consequences

      trick question / minus question

      minus trick / minus minus

      see how everyone heads for the shore

      to greet the unseen vessel

      that’s devoured half the horizon

      but they find instead the moon’s

      portrait sketched on the water

      I say this / as though you were not everyone

      as though the moon had only a stump

      of chalk

      and nothing better to sketch

      than its bleached and bloated self

      the beach is lined with lit-up skulls

      every eye a lighthouse / beaming into flotsam

      but they won’t save us

      my country runs to the edge

      and throws itself in

      when I said beach I meant cliff

Spring, or, I Don’t Know Everything Is Wrong with Me

      Modes СКАЧАТЬ