The Joker

Have you ever been driving and thought you were going to die? There you are, going along Soldier’s Field Road, driving to work in the morning, listening to your favorite radio host agree with his guest that it is difficult to assess risk, when suddenly you feel a pain coming from the middle of your chest. It is sharp and real and heavy, and you take a few deep breaths, tying to exhale the problem out, but the breathing makes it worse, you realize, which is when you start to lose it, sweat, because how the hell are you going to drive to work if you can’t breathe because of the pain it causes you? You try holding your breath, knowing that the relief will last only as long as a minute, if that, and that this solution is silly and childish, but you have to try something. When you start to breathe again out of necessity, your face is hot and must be red, and you panic as a hand that should be on your steering wheel reaches for your heart, trapped under all the layers of clothes and zippers, not to mention skin and bone. So you reach up to your neck to check your pulse, knowing full well that this action will only confirm the devastating truth that yes, your heart is exploding, and you are dying here, pitifully, during your commute. In a panic, you foolishly run through the long list of possible causes that could have brought this on to your seemingly young body—the cigarettes, the late nights, the coffee and the booze, that first year in college, then the second—but the causes don’t matter, you realize, it’s futile recalling the damage you’ve done; it’s too late. So you sit there and drive, keep going, and when you’re not locking your eyes to the lane lines in front of you, you glance over at the other commuters to see if they’re noticing your pain; you check to see if they are looking over at your car in horror as they catch a glimpse of a figure of death sitting smugly in your passenger seat, pressing his fat hand on your chest—which is exactly what it feels like—a monsterous pressure seemingly coming from somewhere outside of you pressing down on your heart—but it’s not outside of you, it’s in you, which is the worst part of all. And you don’t think about how to relieve the pressure or what incisions the surgeons will have to make if you were to survive the inevitable crash once your heart finally stops and your muscles seize and the tiny bomb you’ve been steering is set loose. And you don’t think about the other horrible casualties you would cause once you’re body’s reached its final mile, and you don’t think about how you would recover from this, if you could, or if both sides of your face would be able to move simultaneously again. Instead, you keep driving, keep pushing forward through the pain of it all, thinking only about how much farther you are getting from the love you left sleeping a mere ten minutes ago when all you were worried about was traffic.

---
(k)

For Whom

My heart and brain have somehow traded places. I'm unsure when the transaction occurred, but I know it did. My chest has a new fullness to it: an uncomfortable weight, and my head is empty: my heart rolls around in there, frightened by the space. It keeps bumping against the bone, unable to control the palpitations that come with unexpected travel. If only it could stay still, it could save itself from bruising, but the heart beats and flutters like a dumbfounded bug trying desperately to escape through the closed window. And my brain-oh the brain-suddenly squashed in with other organs, forced to compete with the lungs, begging for blood. It pushes against the sternum, alive and afraid, and my chest rises with a new meaning. My brain is like a ship that's suddenly realized it's been built in the bottle, and that feeling of freedom was merely a folktale. Something bad will come of this, for the body only knows what it's been taught, and everyone wants an answer.

(k)

Real Life

I wrote a poem tonight
there were no birds in it
no animals of any sort
I set about to write
a human
in the poem
Make it machinic,
workable,
a man made humanistic poem
without arms or eyes or even
a soul
but it wasn't
real, it was a representation
of a poem
It was a dream
that God was jealous of
It wasn't real
even though I wrote it,
it didn't exist
even though there was
a single human in it,
the last one
Maybe it's real now
because I say so,
maybe it's truth
because I wrote it in a dream
God didn't have.
I have a memory of it,
and the memory is present,
but the past has a point.
Maybe, if you touch the poem,
you, human,
it will come alive,
or maybe you have to
ingest it
to make it real,
make it feel something
in you, something
realer than a poem,
like anger,
maybe if you stick out your tongue,
licked the screen
with your humanity,
you can give it truth, or if not truth,
than at least some legs
to stand on, legs
that God would be jealous of.
If this poem had legs,
would you read it?
Would you touch it then?

---
(k)

Thor Goes Fishing

At the end of the world
I am not a savior
There is no child
On my back, no sunrise
I am no surgeon
At the end, no lives
Saved by my steady hand
I am not the stalwart priest
Leading the last of us
Into forgiveness
At the end of the world
I am not a poet
I am the one hiding
Behind the last tree
Carving my name in its
Dead trunk
With one long dirty
Fingernail

(k)

travelogue

You've got eight hours to find yourself again, compose yourself, re-apply eyeliner over and over again as the cabin shakes and leg muscles harden from disuse. You really have to re-evaluate yourself when your that far from sea-level. You're staring at the face in the plane bathroom mirror trying to imagine how the hell you fit here, how you fit anywhere, how context ever managed to wrap itself around you in the first place, how everything comes apart and then back together again, and you blame it on time-differences, on the strange avian laws you have to follow now, here, forever. You realize, devastatingly, somewhere between Finland and Norway, that you were the one responsible for making the snowglobe you've been sinking in, and you are not the master craftsman you once thought, because there are tiny cracks now along the outside of you, the pressurized cabin getting heavier, wetter, and you really should have trusted your judgement in the beginning when you wanted more glitter. You've got eight hours to gather yourself, find all the artefacts you brought that will give you comfort, arrange them around your aisle seat like a temple or a funeral pyre, and hope that the one you love will find you, light the first candle.

--
(k)

he is the beast

It lies to her.



It says things only a child can understand.



It has been using her
to restrain the others.



To her...



...it simply is another child.



To us...



...it is the beast.

[quoted text from the script of poltergeist 1]

The Last Act Is An Elephant

I didn’t realize
until now that the
elephant in the room
was actually on my chest
curled up like a monstrous
cat, batting my face
with his hoof.
He’s been too big to see
to notice, some trick of the eye,
a subconscious blocking, but
what a relief
to know that it’s
just his trunk
that’s been pushing
my esophagus in the whole time
and the pain in my chest
is coming from the outside
but still, I keep coughing,
my ribcage rattling
all the compound nouns
stuck in the bronchi
all the real words, the tough ones
stuck inside my belly
refusing to be digested
like corn
and some nights
I get drunk enough
to stick a hand in my mouth
tickle my uvula, finger it
like it was a sex organ
and not a trap door
but nothing comes out but liquid
and what I want
are the words to end this
gracefully
I’ve been eating
Alphabet soup, waiting
for all the letters
to form the right apology
In my gut and I can extract them
carefully, like a surgeon,
with a baby spoon,
scoop out this terrible
finale, this last act,
the death scene,
the one where we both die
and then get resurrected,
hopefully, if this whole damn thing
really is a comedy, because
sometimes you say things
that are so accurate
I have to start laughing
like when you said I was
probably looking for someone else

---
(k)

ultramarine

It was certainly not hard to locate his breath, it was in his chest. Johan, staring out the window, gazing at a crane, delicate on the horizon, a hair thin line dangling, dancing. Joakim, turning back towards the room, a 180-degree pivot, his eyes are mirrors, ugly mirrors. And we discussed, disgust. What was to be done about it? On the riverbank, he was able to discover objective appreciation for physical bodies, male and female. Bodies are not objects (the mere fleshiness constitutes a concrete relationship) an echo of effort, aspiration, an apparition. Something that one might want, want with their hands, want in mirrors, a want for less ugly mirrors.

Johan, slides into the driver seat of his automobile, a clever gesture, and disappears. While we slept, when we woke, the heat settled in like smoke, clear bright, colorful smoke. Joakim returns with a solution, parries with an intellectual remark, psychological rhetoric, claiming syntax, above all, to unpleat her stomach, this had, after all, transformed into a debate. And all the while I was carving new lines into her face. Johan reclined and gained a sense of deliverance from the blue void in front of him. Two words came to our minds “world” “funeral” There are no ghosts etched in the half tones, an absolute zero all will become frozen in dreamless sleep. Tossed and turned. I promise you, my love, that I was only searching for peace.

Apocalypse Poem 1

Your sister thinks
the world is ending again
She will tell him on the phone
And her voice will crack
And we will both wonder
If it is age or the sighed acceptance
that comes with age,
or if, please god,
the lines are just too long
Stretched just too thin across the waters
And the air is just too thick
for our mother’s voice to carry,
because she doesn’t have the heart
to tell us that
the world is ending again,
that there are no more arks,
No more angels.
I’m sorry to be the one to tell you,
But our ship was never meant
to leave the harbor.
It just wasn’t built
To set sail and save us.
The world is ending again, and
This poem is not
a solitary rumination.
It is a terrible swan song,
Screeching through the last
Burning sunset
like a dying Pterodactyl.
This poem is
A miserable fish tearing its lips
Apart on the hook
Flapping for survival.
I write you now: get ready.
Because Kafka was wrong,
inspiration will not writhe
at your feet. Like life,
You have to hunt it.
You have to throw out line after line
And pray, Dear god,
Pray there are still
fish for us to kill
until we die.


--
(k)

smoke lead me to fire

When the hairdresser’s hand brushed my face I thought yes this is how we connect. But the long nights, impassive, marked with a cigarette, two people, silent, a large bed, like a dormitory, with invisible boundaries, invisible but perceptible. One must wonder if this was what we were made for. Made by Our Father, made to be aggressive in the mornings, desperate in the noon, numb in the evening. Did he have that in mind, in the design? I thought, I need to go home to get away, to connect with an empty screen, to see, for 35 minutes, images, barely attaching themselves to any sort of imagination, stuck on the walls (if I could be so bold, its laughable) but nothing, a quick accent, a quicker decent. God forbid

God forbid some sort of exchange, some sort of catalyst. Smoke lead me to fire. And if I could start a fire, I would start a fire. But there will always be tears, the mourning parishioners, rather one, dragged through the dirt, like a wild west form of discipline. No horses, no saloons. Tears on one end, and on the other, God knows, that riddle. What has two ends and extends in separate directions, forever? I know the answer. I know, also, that the world is in fact flat, and I can run to the end of it. It wouldn’t be so hard, but I would never.

So this is it then. The stills, cycles, windows with thick glass, they’re all left open, but none of us would dare to climb in, climb out. There it is, its morning, and tomorrow, it will be morning again. Until? I’m betting with a man that something might happen, I’m sitting at a table with that man, staring him in the eyes, reading the future in the shadow patterns, coffee grounds, tea stains, migratory bird patterns, clock ticks, heart-beats, coin tosses, passing of faraway trains.

[A]

Poem*

When we were young
We had so much time to worry,
To complain. We had no idea
It was a gift, not a god-given
Right. Back then,
We would cry over everything:
A split lip, a misunderstanding,
a toothache.
And someone was always
There to answer to it,
Catch us in their arms and say
Go ahead.
Now, there is no time,
Not even to cry.
I thought about it today,
I thought,
I’m just going to break down.
But then I caught myself
Like a word in the throat
stuck in the mucus.
There is no time for this, I knew.
No one pays you to cry.
But maybe later, was the hope,
Maybe in the car, when I am alone again,
Or perhaps the second
shower before
I have to work again.
But then, I knew, the feelings could be gone,
Like a story you meant
To tell someone
Before they got on their train to go again.
So I kept working,
Felt my face get hot
With a sadness
there would be no time
To let out, recognize.


...
(k)

*Inspired by (a)