Our Books of Poetry

Detail is cesarean. Denim dollars of the music twig. My despair, on the other hand, comes furnished with sandstone. Each worry has a personality and conveys shape and motion. I spin faster and faster among the stars. Breakfast is powder blue ovals accelerating the noise of my skin. Processes of hair emerge from my head as Albert Einstein plays the accordion. Assumptions of gravity are implicit in a Martian’s ear. I feel monstrous, blessed, and useful. Each sentence gives birth to itself on the tongue of a moment. Life causes description, which is effervescent, and smells of evergreen. I don’t like broccoli. But I can lift a thought into utility with a little straw and glue. Reading is complementary. A few people continue to read and think while the rest of civilization unravels in dead ideologies. My arms continue the idea of my shoulders to the tips of my fingers. I hold a book in my hands that says that substance is literal and paradise is dreamy and soft. The mind is a soup of pharmaceuticals and syntax guides us to feeling. Those of us with a taste for oblivion endure waves of personal water. Our wings are ourselves. We gather abstractions in baskets of kerosene and light them on fire. The spectacle swims with the veins of purity. I study the flow of blood. I carve a life out of the mountain. A strand of blue rag dribbles down the bathtub mirror. The amoebae moan. Television jingles and twitches in unexpected snow. Television is a box that acts like Technicolor. Our books of poetry tell us something different. Our books of poetry tell us that pronouns are forceps for the illusion of identity and that prophecies of flight amplify the engines of inspiration. Our books of poetry smell of railroads and creosote. Our books of poetry offer properties of meaning that glow in consciousness like incidents of rib and rhubarb. Writing is not always paper. Sometimes it’s vermilion and cries like an anguish suckling a headlight of words. Semantic fiber. Autonomous ornamentation. Anthologies of throat. Whipped cream in a red mug. The experience of spars beneath the stars.