Benediction
Week at a Glance
Love Is a UFO
Conspiracy Theories
Winter of Discontent
Irreverent Juxtapositions
Love everything that lives
and be fair to all the parts
and do not have a hierarchy,
but should the uniforms come
for you under cover of night
eager to convey you into smoke,
resolve to become like the drunks
who, when sufficiently enraged,
can just shrug off the paralyzing effects
of being tasered, or like the wind
that dies one moment only to return
the next as poems and explosions.
Sunday stitches eyelids shut. Monday
gesticulates with the soggy, chewed-up
end of a cigar. Tuesday loses a crap job
and never finds another near as good.
Wednesday hangs itself in the shower.
Thursday, when asked, can’t explain it.
Friday tosses and turns under glow-in-the
dark ceiling stars. Saturday tries to get
in the door without the dogs going crazy.
after Paul Nougé
The heart inside your chest
isn’t the fist-sized muscle
you have been told it is,
but a day of fires and sirens
you carry around with you,
a bomb-damaged church,
or, better yet, a spaceship
with dozens of portholes
and the screaming face
of an abductee in everyone.
We know the magician doesn’t actually make the card disappear, but where does it go? The only words anyone truly needs are all locked permanently away in a featureless block of silence. Still, when someone announces, “I’m going to kill myself,” you better take them seriously. Everyone isn’t me. I believe it was Freud who said dreams are the day’s thick residue. Think about it. Think hard about it. Life has become a conspiracy inside a conspiracy, with candles shaped like Jesus, and houses covered in dots or numbers, and visitors from distant cities clutching prescriptions no one will fill.
The day was cold even by New England standards. Girls dumped menstrual blood on the icy sidewalks in some kind of protest. I never actually went to art school, so, to me, this was art school. As a kid, I had won a goldfish at the county fair by tossing a ping-pong ball into the fish’s bowl. Years later, a co-worker would look at me with a stricken face, as if to warn that she was a danger to herself and others. I wanted to say everything would be OK, but the heart must either break or turn to lead.
1
“Last name?”
“Good”
“How do you spell that?”
“Like God, but with two o’s.”
2
I could have been an artist,
drawn stick figures on toilet paper,
you never know
3
Be water
Blossom everywhere
Howie Good is the author most recently of Stick Figure Opera: 99 100-word Prose Poems from Cajun Mutt Press. He co-edits the online journals Unbroken and UnLost.
