In every room there is no room for art.
Voices stream from boxes, images
of American absurdity.
My father, estranged, sardonically yells:
“Someone took the batteries out of the
remote! Some body, ah-hee-he-heee!”
And my mother speeds about, eagerly, room to room:
“I can’t find my glasses
if I can’t see them!”
I take my blue notebook to the backyard.
It’s so bright and stifling that it feels like I’m shitting
pushing this thing out on the sun.
The neighbor is a:
radio full of announcements
flag whipping in the caustic breeze
motorcycle revving engine
man going through the 45 yr. old plunge
trying to make as much noise as possible to keep
from thinking, the American way
a goblet overflowing with beer
“I’m only having four, honey!”
And the train shoots by
at the foot of this lawn, jostling
clamoring along rails, screeching
breaks, honking that horn.
Don’t these people know that I’m a, uh—
what was I?
An old morning dove quietly lands on the deck banister
sick with fear of human hullabaloo
feathers ruffled, tipping into a mindless darkness
it looks at me with small, wet black eyes
blinks rapidly, shits one tiny black pebble
like a burnt piece of gravel, then
flies off and drops dead
in the babel air.
These flames
burning my skin
I now know
that we are sweat
blotching about the paper
erasing our own
words.
Mathias Nelson: http://www.nyqpoets.net/poet/mathiasnelson