All I Have is Poetry
How all poems are poems. Including lines from Jack Collom, Francesca Kritikos, and Michael Martin Shea.
My ten years in Chicago approaches me.
Wind hitting face hard
like brick, exhaust burning from the 606 trail,
same brown pants I thrifted five years ago.
No longer
am I stunting in
the bad blunt bangs I did.
Old books rotate
out of the collection,
vogue out of choice
collared shirts, hat, key
chains. I am different
now, but not just yet.
All I have is all poetry.
How all poems are poems.
I have wanted nothing more
than to coexist in the ether
from all of Earth’s language possibilities.
Worlds where thiss’ and thats’
become interwoven in wantonness,
acquired taste for small prose views.
I’ve taken up a writing workshop,
but have attended only one of them.
Nervousness, the fever.
I wrote one poem,
from the 2004 American Poets collection,
trans/fixed by brute phrasing
of Jack Collum,
seen in ecopoetics, and then again
in the Poetry Foundation, from his
poem, “little report of the day”
After finishing that
(immediately after, during, in
fact) the
strange thing is there’s so much left out.
Oh yes! About last night,
Chicago Review reading, I stood
near Michael Martin Shea
after babe bought To Hell With Good Intentions.
I’m waiting for the conversation to happen
around me the way history does
bizarre animal perplexing with its noises
I wanted to ask you about Lafayette,
your commute,
writing poetry out of the bottom
of the state.
Everyone’s talking about degrees.
Making a future out of poems but
sorry, I just meant,
where is the hope in all this?
I ran into Francesca Kritikos,
whose poems I have
been Googling from
back and forth
from my computer for weeks
between dyslexic assessments,
a job I manage.
I oo and aaa at her phrasing.
Jigglypuff
Nicorette
early detection
pregnancy tests
sweet potato
dipped in milk
polyester
feels like silk
phenibut
modafinil
Senokot
Benadryl
seltzer water
cigarettes
I won’t get better
I don’t forget
For work, I ask,
how do you manage
the way one reads?
My boss says,
by intervening.
Isn’t that nice?
Lists becomes my ruin.
Haiku, malaise, w
I hope to open
some wider thing between me.
Shells, nuance
cadence, reverie,
Christian stuff, mandolins.
I buy two new books on sex
when no one is looking, see?
It’s all new to me.
It’s only this,
poems and form.
For Emma, in Town tomorrow
Yes, I am grateful.
For every which way
that there it is
coming our way.
I am
& also even more so,
we, are happy
to see you
and be altogether
grateful for you
at large and laugh
so largely so
and also so
far, for
our lackluster couch
and bed spring mattress,
for the both of us.
I wonder, though not
to keep asking why,
or if it even
matters
to ask: Who
Is pushing who?
Is it me and us?
The plane and you?
Crashing our
stories up, not
that you would do that.
Not that would I try it.
Feral Dove / Discount Guillotine workshop (2024)