Addonizio - Mortal trash: poems

Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks. for Aya, always CONTENTS Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks. MORTAL
TRASH This is me, depressed out of my mind, frailing the banjo, spilling red wine on the white king-sized luckily-hotels-and-not-my goose down comforter, this is me walking and waxing nostalgic through the girlish shadows of tall palm trees, the dj vus flying through the scene suddenly, like those three unnameable and therefore beautiful white birds. This is me as a slowly-tearing-itself-apart cloud and marveling at a fire palely and flamily emerging from a bowl, wavering up through stones of cobalt glass. The air wavers back.

This is me in love with the beauty of blue glass in flames, this is me on drugs prescribed by my doctor as I try once more to sneak into nights closely guarded city, my hollow horse ready to wreak my demons and Blue Morphos on the citizens of my sleep. I am most myself when flashing rapidly my iridescent wings, drinking the juice of fallen fruit. Then again look for me under your bed where the ugly premodern vampires still hide. The undead and I are lying in wait. We are very interested in you though this is still me. We are unstable and true.

We believe in the one-ton rose and the displaced toilet equally. Our blues assume you understand not much, and try to be alive, just as we do, and that it may be helpful to hold the hand of someone as lost as you. There goes the lightbulb filament another soul uploaded to the ether, cigarette hissing in a plastic cup, the party on the deck entering the hour of ominous sounds in the woods. Maybe wild animals, maybe lesser demons strewing the garbage, thieving chickens and itty dogs, clawing at the sliding doors. The crash cart is rolled from the room. The daughter looks at her drunk father slumped in a hospital chair.

Something flowers in the air above the bed but no one can say what. Even with a full box of matches no one can get the pilot relit; the oven stays cold, but at least the burners work. The meal is spoiled, but at least theres wine. The party guests disappear one at a time into the trees. The two who are left take off their clothes together. There goes a candle wick into a sea of melted wax.

For an instant it flames on the surface. Hot lights above the amusement pier, screams and laughter, then everythings frozen solid. Step out carefully. Take an ax. Wheelbarrows are falling in the Czech Republic but in Wales, old ladies and sticks are landing on the farms not yet carried off by owls, knives and forks are clattering on the barns. Gurgle. Gargle. Gargle.

Some dragon is down with the flu, asking Who am I without my Kundalini breath, why dont I have any friends, as soon as Im better Im going to torch an elementary school. In Union Square, the vendors are packing up peaches and artisanal cheeses, castles and pawns are being disappeared from the chess players tables, shitty art reinstalled in the museums of panel vans. Umbrellas and hoodies, tarps on the carts of the homeless hunkering down while leaves skid around. In Greece chair legs drive themselves into stone and sink into the Aegean, but in Syria chemical weapons are descending meaning raining down like secretaries and restaurant workers from the towers, meaning metaphor is being abandoned for the hell of the real, meaning what falls from the sky keeps falling. Feallan. Fission.

Thermonuclear but not yet cobalt. What the rain said to the wind was not You push and Ill pelt but Lets see who can destroy the most flowers though it also may have said Sometimes I want to weep softly while you moan over the seedlings. In Germany it rains puppies where once rained Walther bullets, and in Denmark, shoemakers apprentices land softly on the earth, and set off to teach whom they can. One stood among the violets listening to a bird. One went to the toilet and was struck by the moon. One felt hopeless until a trumpet crash, and then lo, he became a diamond.

I have a shovel. Can I turn it into a poem? On my stove Im boiling some milk thistle. I hope it will turn into a winged thesis before you stop reading. Look, Im topless! Listen: approaching hooves! One drowned in a swimming pool. One removed his shoes and yearned off a bridge. One lives with Alzheimers in a state facility, spittle in his white beard.

It turns out words are no help. But here I am with my shovel digging like a fool beside the spilth and splosh of the ungirdled sea. I cant stop. The horses are coming, the thieves. I still havent found lasting love. I still want to hear viols in the little beach hotel thats torn down and gone.

I want to see again the fish schooling and glittering like a veil where the waves shove against the breakwater. Gone is the girl in her white slip testing the chill with one bare foot. Its too cold, but she goes in, so carefully, oh. A bunch of it is floating somewhere way out in the Pacific. If your love is deeper than the ocean, then the surface of your love is a swirl of swill, toothbrushes and swizzle sticks carried by the inevitable current: someone comes saying Oh oh shit baby baby then someone leaves the house key on the table and sends a vaguely apologetic email. Sunlight is bad for plastic.

Imagine an Evian bottle having a breakdown, getting eaten by a jellyfish which is eaten by a bigger fish which becomes a breaded, deep-fried rectangle on a cafeteria tray. In an airport you can eat with a metal fork but the knife must be made of extruded polymers to keep you from committing hara-kiri as you return from delivering your lecture on postmodern literary theory. Back home, while you take your green canvas bag to the store for beer and cereal, the garbage in the ocean drifts, sidereal. Think of the Earth as a big snow globe floating in space, only the snow is really sticky and doesnt melt, even when the atmosphere sizzles with migraine. Here come those zigzag lights and a sickening feeling. Make that sinking.

Party cup, fake fruit, heart souvenir. Even if your love is brighter than the sun, the ick of snow keeps falling. Everyone feels a little tender when stabbed with a fork. Oh hell, heres that dark wood again. You thought youd gotten through it middle of your life, the ogre turned into a mouse and heart-stopped, the old hag almost done, monsters hammered down into their caves, werewolves outrun. Youd come out of all that, into a field.

There was one man standing in it. He held out his arms. Ping went your iHeart so you took off all your clothes. Now there were two of you, or maybe one, mashed back together like sandwich halves, oozing mayonnaise. You lived on grapes and antidepressants and the occasional small marinated mammal. You watched the DVDs that dropped from the DVD tree.

Nothing was forbidden you, so no worries there. It rained a lot. You planted some tomatoes. Something bad had to happen because no trouble, no story, so Fuck you, fine, whatever, here come more black trees hung with sleeping bats like ugly Christmas ornaments. Dont you hate the holidays? All that giving. All those windup crches, those fake silver icicles.

If you had a real one you could skewer the big cursed heart of your undead love. Instead you have a silver noodle with which you must flay yourself. Denial of pleasure, death before death, alone in the woods with a few bats unfolding their creaky wings. Maybe were all just integers. The genes using us to multiply. Marketing teams herding us into focus groups and serving us antibiotic silage before hammering a product into our foreheads.