Poetry
You Slighted Me; I Pissed on the Interstate
Jon Powell
The trouble is we take so much as finished
when in reality it is unleavened. Undone.
The room still cluttered.
The story still a corny collection
of bitter hindsights.
The gutteral moans in reality mere whininess.
Cassandra in drag singing war songs in a smoky Berlin bar.
& someone we don't care about
pleads our case before the stonish court.
Watch your step—
the hallways are slippery w/the blood of the carefree.
It's not measured in degree, but nuance.
One red cunt hair wide, deep & tall.
The loaves & fishes & glasses of wine
are still in the warehouse.
The paperwork late again.
The messenger befouled once more
down @ the corner lounge & who stumbles out later
like Meshach from the furnace saying
"let my people go."
W/all the twitterings & disclaimers,
we so blithesomely stumble on. Strong we.
*
"This is how it ends," my uncle Clem said,
his pudgy arm across the vinyl benchtop
of his 53 Dodge,
the speedometer hovering on 75.
& we nesting in the back seat,
amorphously dividing each other's twelve year old bodies.
Our functions @ once irrational & sublime
eight years after the last war; months before the next.
*
If this is the end, then let me wack off
thinking of you.
Buried naked in the world.
The shouting, pointless, panicked world.
The world of hairy arms & legs & backs.
The world of slaughtered pigs.
The world of bursted pimples.
The world of rotting flesh.
The world of the movable feast, the movable
decimal point.
The world of shifting sands,
the shiftless,
the shafted.
If this is the end,
let me walk to the crematorium.
I can take it.
This & the booze & the offhand jokes & the unwanted rejoinders.
This & the holy fuck you.
This & the jizz & bloody spent nights,
this & the dime bags, the cocks @ half mast.
This & the towers, the castles, the cocked .38s.
This & the carrols of doom,
the lunging fingers, the probing pricks.
This & the wagers, the investors, the calamitous
coiners of new words.
If this is the end,
let me walk to the end of the pier.
If this is the end,
let me step into the ocean.
If this is the end,
let me swallow it all
hard & firm & whole.