Imagining a bad future.
We close our eyes and pull
A white sheet over ourselves.
Tell the woman about the woman
That did not happen.
Tales were made and now they're real
Make us march Make us feel!
My feel when that curse lights a pyre
OH MY FEET!
MY FIERY FEET! MY FEET OF FIRE!
Sunlight reported dumped in a trashcan.
On its fingers had been fifteen rings arranged
In a spiral position, inwards.
Rings ripped off, probably
With a strong, serrated tongue.
Victim was reported “to have
Just been about
To start a brand
New day, a brand new life.”
Threw up fifteen times
Trying to retrieve the shape then toss
It up into the sky.
Shape embossed on the can-lid:
Tiger with a monkey in its whirlpools.
White sun poisoning
Everything. She was a young woman at the time
When light kept streaming through
Her windows at altogether the wrong kind
Of daytime, late
The way life kept catching her unawares.
She had a remote job she was trying to keep,
Alone in a countryside that felt
Like a necropolis: everything
Had been managed and so
Everything stank of death
Or had stunk so brightly it need be perfumed
And so the memory — stamped out.
Sometimes she danced alone
In her apartment,
Or called her girlfriend who lived
In a city maybe hundreds of millions
Of miles away, at least when traveled to
On foot.
Really it was falling apart.
Maybe everything was falling apart.
What to say about her face.
She had lips.
He hair caught in her food while she ate —
Hunched over the table, on her stool.
She had eyes always darting away.
In her cart
There was a leopard
On a diamond chain.
She had considered suicide several times
In the preceding months then scratched
The itch. Mostly
By listening to music.
That kind of October, early —
Tree leaves still green
So everything dead, so dead. And from birth.
She didn’t know if she could get mail to where
She was. She worried like that.
God can speak. Sometimes
God writes your suicide note in vibrating
Meat. In the vibrating moments
Of the atmosphere
Those lesser beasts called — “lightning.”
Previous sewer explorers were reportedly
Looking for valuables.
These three came out and headed north.
I’m not saying Santa
Is involved, but the timing
Is interesting.
Why can’t I look
At a woman, why can’t
I live an open life! Why can’t
I follow a girl home
One. Point one
Million tadpoles in every
Straylap of sewer water
— Potted in the crevice
Of the road.
I don’t want to blow things up
I am a meek man
I am a humble man
So what if I look at a woman’s ass
On the bus or that
I shout and talk to myself
Running my hands over my undersized
T shirt
Please let me leave this unclad room
You are so much bigger than me
In the heart
And I am afraid
Please I am begging
I could not control my eyes
Or my feet or
My hands
Look at me now, in my seat
Intended
That’s good faith now please just
Let me go
A couple police officers
On the corner they — stand
In the dirt of the air — carrier
Birds.
When they arrive it is too late.
A cracked phone drinking heavy
From a pocket of water
& Starting to swell
Starting to swell unto bursting.
I’m now on the road to get me made
Some sort of machine to do my work. Machines for me.
My cider-mill — does that ever steal
My cider? My mowing-machine —
Does that ever lay a-bed mornings? My corn-husker
— Does that ever give me insolence? No: cider-mill,
Mowing-machine, corn-husker — all faithfully attend
To their business. Disinterested, too;
No board, no wages;
Yet doing good
All their lives long;
Shining examples that virtue is its own reward
— The only practical Christians I know.
There are pumpkins on the ground.
Pumpkins set the civilized arrangements
And expectations — one could uproot everyhouse
And shoot the dogs in the street,
Roll up the streets so the red
Carpet might avoid,
And still, with the pumpkins,
We would have a perfect heat map of what happened.
When we made a monograph of her things,
Gathered them up and listed them
After it all happened,
Some of the things were taken back
And when the body was gone from
The things that remained — there,
We found almost exactly the
Outline of her that we remembered, which
Troubled us. Maybe we should
Have been better friends but
No, we had
The costume; wore it.
Decorations were set up in the August of
That year, plastic skeletons
With ambulance eyes, a witch
And cauldron, dry and with
The residue of lipstick on the edge.
Death lives in a wooden house
Of spokes
With no walls and no ceiling
Or floor
He sleeps in a drafty bed
And snores
With his cloak and his flatfish face
And two wooden
Feet — poorly carved and fitted
To where his ankles bled
With frost.
A horror story has a monster,
A vampire in a big cloak
And a red bolo;
Two fangs and a mosquito-stinger
Nose, a wasp’s
Eyes, rubber skin.
In the rain or wind
The paint peals away
And what is left is a leached shade
Of nocolor,
Not quite capable of touching anything
Or either really staying still.
On the walk home between
Faded buildings that leered,
Past the hospital —
She was always thinking about
Asking one
Of the nurses on break
If they would share a smoke
And never did — , the squirrels
So well roadkilled that their
Pelts + giblets
Had gone native — pothole-fillers, she
Would try to imagine what it would
Be like to stop for a moment, and
Rest, or in
A moment of narcissism imagining
That she got a job at the grocery store
And had to deal with the affections of
Her patrons, with being followed home
Each night and having to ask
The local cops to
Keep an officer retained
To do just the same thing: local stalking,
Though in reverse,
Though in reverse.
Though sometimes this really had happened.
When it had, the impression really did
Not seem to matter, then all
At once (this had been with intimates
Most frequently, though strangers
Were a more compelling villain;
Toothless boars, dreaming
In the mud) she would be angry
And crying bloodjets of lava, so
Angry she was mute, all of her words
Dissipating like heat
Into the Autumn atmosphere…
Compost, rooting through it,
Trying to find what remained of the
Skulls from older owners’ trashpiles
At the family home, which would
Have been sold in her lifetime, though
If one talked around the words of life
Carefully it could have seemed
That the house — repainted three
Times in her youth — would weather
The storm for many generations of
Her bloodline.
(it made almost unbearable trouble for the concierge) Sweet
Oil, the white of eggs, mustard and water, soap suds and stomach
Pumps rescue the people one knows. Every afternoon
The people one knows can be found at the café.
Eventually the communication became
More remote and more
Analogue; she stopped with
The phonecalls and
Started sending a lot
Of emails (though
She never stopped sending me
Videos of funny animals
On Facebook) in a way
That implied she didn’t really
Want to be conversant with
The mouth.
Maybe it was what killed her; maybe
Something else had did it far before,
A sudden judder of electromagnetism in
The brain;
A bad shutterspeed adjustment like a plastic
Braineater wormprop — a tingler whorl
Of the braincolor dropped on the stage
And an electric chair that shakes one member
Of the audience awake, an actor trained
A plainclothes actor paid to fake a seizure.
Nothing can stop me now:
I live on in the things I gathered with me;
For the right people looking
Upon my accumulations might transfer
Those last couple months and kill.
I am diverting myself
Again and again
Into the things I have
That — connected by dark bands
Of electricity — can spark and spark
Again. You
Are seeing my face in repose
Layered over your face in the dark of a pond
You choose, and choose day in
Choose day out
Again, repeatedly, I — am the painting
In the cave you squat in,
A perfectly anatomically accurate shape
Of a horse in two directions, done
In read ochre. And when your eyes dart
You see repeats of me
In lover’s declarations and in
The ancient figures those drew over.
I am waiting in a field in the rain
In the dark with my hands
In my pockets.
You go out to meet me and I scream
And call down lightning.
It bursts into
A succession of flames
The eye bounces back and forth
Like an animated cursor.
I am leaving you
I am leaving you
With me, and you will be alone
With me. That was many men’s
Wish, and it is what YOU
Will get.
Suitcase; briefcase my grandfather
Gave me (dead) while
I was cleaning out his house;
Plastic bin I kept all my pairs
Of jeans in, and used
As a coffee table;
Fourteen mugs, one
In the shape
Of a Halloween witch,
One a friend gave me
That had a pun on my bachelor’s
Thesis on the outer; a blazer;
My papers; my toothbrush;
My medications (wasn’t
Going to get a refill
Until December,
But that was normal);
A bedframe;
Extra screws to assemble
My bedframe;
A baseball bat that I kept
By the door of my first
Apartment
Because I was frightened
All the time, which was under
My bedframe when it
Came down to it; a shaving
Razor; a set of Wüsthof
Kitchen knives (a graduation
Gift); my shitbox car;
My best friend
And my lover; a phone;
Quite a bit of correspondence.
A hairy thing that lurked
Outside the dumpster
With fluorescent eyes in the shape
Of the plastic cones that we use
To outline the turf in the interior
Gym, a rosebush of fangs
So baroque its mouth was always
Agape,
Babirusa-snarled and all
Made from modeling clay
That you bake and which
Emits poison fumes
When you bake.
A constant tongue
In the shape of a wineglass.
It wasn’t there, that night:
Now I float on with wings
Of broken screendoors.
It wasn’t a note or
Anything written out
And intended.
A band of colorless light
Came down,
It was murder.
-- Noam Hessler is an American poet. They recently released a book called Officeparks. They live in New York and Vermont, and can be reached online via Twitter @poetryaccnt1518.
