Audio: Read by the author.
I am bored of all the excuses.
Bored as Mayakovsky
at the Finnish painters’ exhibition
barking like a dog through the foreign minister’s toast
until he cried and sat down. Deadly serious.
I am bored as an elegy. I mean,
why care at all, speaking as a pitfall
in a world of pits. But we do. To the death.
We all agree to garden this year.
And my raspberry bushes,
picked over by wrens—
I’ll make them great again
and let America go wild.
It’ll be all trumpets and leeks and lilacs
from here on out.
Let’s stop paying for it, get it free.
Let’s plan our victory gardens to supplement grief,
boost morale, as though something new
and uncontrolled were available—
it is the original new hot future joy.
We’re making it out of dough.
And the illusion of separateness,
let it go back into remission.
Just look at you—you look
like a resurrected child.
A serious drama in a cosmic joke.
Scarred, masked, dangerous.
And what of the new Eucharist?
How hungry I always am. How I long to lack.
Though in Walmart
my heart beats a little faster.
I want the world to heal up.
And the world is a field—as if it were indeed flat, curving
and caving, as if it were a piece of paper,
a Gustave Doré engraving
from the Divina Commedia,
the one with the silhouettes of Dante and Beatrice
standing in front of the blinding
exploding white rose
that you realize when looking more closely
is all made up of bodies and wings twisting together;
the “saintly throng,” they call it, mashed and hurtling,
an image of Heaven, and the creation of angels, though it is
frenzied as any image of Hell, around a divine nipple,
Odin’s lost eye in the well, the drain to the other side,
joy that gets more frantic
the more you try to quiet it down.
