Poems from Crash Course #3
Here is a selection of the poems read at Crash Course #3 : The Future.
Please feel free to send me more, if you read, or if you were unable to attend but made some new work.
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Ben Weaver
Untitled
¾ of a mile ahead
in the heat at the side
of the road
her underwear half ways off
the moon in a puddle
a smudge of pollen at her throat
the lilacs and wood paneling
on hidden steps
under the crashing airbus
I’m going to touch the bottom
she says and then disappears
what next
The ice still melting in her glass
Welcome ghost welcome star
There might be change lost between
the couch cushions
fallen from the pockets of
my friends, my mother
the pockets of those who owned the
couch before
there in the unshinning darkness
under asses and graham cracker crumbs
with popcorn and dog hair
stranger to stranger to stranger
to one day be found
ahead of their time
then the sirens in the distance
behind the burning carpet factory
behind the 5 car pile up
before the hospital
as with the whistle before the train
the coyotes before the city
who now live in the city
along railroad tracks
streambeds and berry patches
On the out skirts of neighborhoods with no shade
But with streets and cul de sacs named after trees
where it never actually gets dark
where it always smells like dryer sheets
according to the pictures in the paper
Pirates no longer wear eye patches
Or have peg legs
The pope is bullet proof
There are too many rabbits
Too many deer
Nursing homes fill and empty
Instead of dying the old ones pee into
Plastic bags and take pills
While the young ugly ones do it alone
Choosing fabric and seat assignments
On the expense account
On the commuter train
The expectations projected
Never quite reached the lover or the family
The weather then forecasted and read
Prepared for or avoided entirely
Dragging the long hand and the short
Hand like arrows from a quiver
The water drips from her
Shoulders and through the slats
In the dock back into the lake
This time the present
forms its lines in the future
As the song from the
ice cream truck gets closer
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Patrick Barry
Father’s Day: a Film
(marathon training, week two)
Today is a Sunday like any other summer Sunday—
unlike the Sunday that topped all Sundays,
that autumn Sunday that would come to define me
when you crossed the finish
and collapsed
a modern day Pheidippides.
It was your last race, your last of anything.
It was the last of anything that I remember clearly—all else
has taken the form of the formless, a gray ether.
It was a dream of yours to run a marathon,
just like it was a dream of yours to own a green MGB.
You never did either, 35 years is hardly an adequate chance.
I’ve searched for someone to blame
and can’t point any fingers—yet.
I used to think I wouldn’t make it to half your age. 17
and I’d collapse—half as healthy, half as worthy to live and die.
I’m 23 and still convinced I’ll die the way you did. The appealing
and inevitable headline:
Son dies as did his father: ran himself to death.
A romantic tragic-comedy novel would soon follow
and eventually be filmed—
a Criterion Collection cult classic
with an indistinguishable distinction between fate
and self-fulfilling prophecy.
Gray ether would abound.
It would make a whole lot of perfect senseless sense.
I would buy a green MGB and drive it once. I would run a marathon
and collapse upon its completion.
It would be a Sunday like any other Sunday.
I would be 36 years old.
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Bill Caperton
Cherry Pit / Crystal Vision
Sunday afternoon,
bent over a bowl pitting cherries,
fingers thick with Door county gore,
sweet and sour fumes,
rolling a pit
across the backs of my teeth,
I drift backward, walking the hills above Whipple,
thick air hanging over asphalt,
sucking wild honey
out of snapdragon blossoms,
and it somehow feels
like a place I’m moving toward,
not some long past memory vision,
and I feel the future coming
in my children – unknown,
unformed flecks of brain dust,
atomic mysteries, silent and separate,
and I can taste what they will taste
in the thin straw-lipped flowers
letting go of what they strained
so long for, bent toward
the sun, always passing out of reach,
cooled by the moon, by night rain,
waiting for our footsteps.
We are waiting for ourselves
for a long, long time.
We will know it when
we see it.
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Andrew Cahak
EX-COPCARS
In the future, all cars will be ex-copcars. That’s the only way I see things going down. See, I plan on getting harder, like a hammer; and I plan on getting fatter, too. In the future, we’ll all carry hammers, all the time, because we’ll need to; because there’s a million jobs for hammers in this town. The poor drunks, leaning against the shop walls, they’ll lend us some jar booze and we’ll get real, real low in a hurry. We’ll dance stupidly in the streetlight and then pile into our old cruisers. Rounding corners in want of a siren, so we’ll let our lips go slack and push the sound out ourselves. Midnights spent cooling curbside. The itches, the spilled ejaculate and there is paint everywhere. There are no cycles, though; this is a line. With time, I’ll be the dog in your back seat (my belly will burn on the hot vinyl); I’ll be the wolf. I’ll be the donkey and the bees and the honey between the two. The mechanic and the body artist. And That Girl will look up and I’ll be holding just a brush, no hammer in sight (for once). I can feel it all compressing, I know it’s all blurring. My tongue rolls out of the corner of my mouth and bobs, juice dripping onto my clothes; I don’t care. There is no room for care anymore. Carelessness is the best sauce a steak can have. I long for the day when I will rot away. The junkyard, that’s where it all belongs, anyway. So, let’s cook, we’ll build a feast. An unforgettable pleasure. A time that was. A smash.
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Mark Fleury
AWAKE PORTAL
The latest, having to be midnight, and palatial as a
Beheading, my lung mirror has taken refuge in your
Gate. It’s squeak, mouse-matched, can’t dull
Flames whose aims, oil-sprawled, shape shift
From inhaled, sweet smelling pollution, into a living
Language that can’t exclude filth that’s sold
By the barrel. And paid for with emptied gums,
Eye sockets and souls from live wired
Thoughts traded for sleeping pills. As the
Chill fills ice, the sold, worm-dirtied mind
Stays high on the coursing
Blood, deserted or under the scalpel, of holy
Flesh, buried alive underneath eyelids of
The sand falling, hands to mouth, throat.
To quench maps of thirst. Worlds burst open
Caskets of money in their televisions. And vision
Hangs from the hook. Books have been floated
Down the streams of banks to oceans of brains
About hearts cut and coins flashing up through
Sewers flooding veins of human remains.
Then there’s the blue cat skeleton, helping itself
To the ghosts of the rotting meat washed ashore.
Once winged, heroic thoughts of peace, now strange
Smoldering feelings decayed to
Teeth of smiles. There’s a picture of some of
Their exposed wires in your blue purse. Next to
The jewels stolen from the eyes of your
Pharmacist. It’s that coldness that makes the
Petals fall from the flowers. The frost can only
Touch the bluest parts of the flame’s withering stem
That is a metaphor, like the multiple
Vibrations that are poetry, for the
Oneness that is God’s Light
In relation to the spaciousness that precedes
The void that is external reality. Eyes shake
Like train cars without brakes. Snakes shed
The skins of the stems to
Reveal freight of diamonded
Coal taken from bassinets. Crumpled up pages
Came of age on that journey
That includes stars becoming lakes.
Can you feel the ache in the abdomen of
Their wet fuse that can’t be lit?
The blaze of glory has drowned. Cities
That loomed large have become small towns
Compared to the Atlantis I’m no longer
Ashamed of. It’s been threaded
Together like the bridges
From LSD cars to Mars. There are forests
In outer space, car chases that have stained
The last page of my wine glass. Looks like the
Blood of apes can travel far, at least from
Spirits to bottles behind a neighborhood bar.
Don’t let space-heads fool you, Spirit is Form,
First a window, then the alcohol that cleans it.
It can run on the vapors of the steam engine
That is your most teeth-clenched rage, ageing
The machinery of your conspiracies.
