Patriotic Abeccedarian
Morning Exercise
Public Address
We None of Us
The Myth
Lost and Found
I Was a Teenage Phenomenologist
Interdepartmental
A Cappella
Career
Cinema Potente
Conversion
i am so american it hurts
before cold war b-movie puberty posters you are
your middle name is danger your middle finger is hunger
evel knievel eats kniffles in the sight of his enemies
fuck that guy if he can’t take a joke
in every generation, a person must regard themself as though they personally
were their own grandpa
imagine there's no heartland above us new york times
your jingoism is your pragmatism arrayed like the sun
the killing floor the killing field the killing trap the killing spree
kill with kindness make a killing kill the story die laughing
he laughs but he does not laugh as he is asked to climb the mountain again
brave new economy brave new public square brave new racial reconciliation
brave new world’s police force brave new kitchen table brave new board of education
the earth is yours for you bought it and you own it the sea too you own and all the
creatures who crawl upon the earth to work for you and all those who perish
in the water attempting to cross your borders
your prosperity floats all our boats the poor we will always have with us but
poverty not slobberty amirite
the quid pro quo of salvation you save those who save themselves
we remember the names of your rich on our public buildings remember the soldiers
who are dead we remember them when they are dead
i sing of arms and the right to bear them
you make a tiramisu of terrorism counter terrorism domestic terrorism
a bananas foster of the military-industrial complex
our umbrella against the hard rain
vengeance is yours the way of the cross has gone the way of the dinosaur
act extrajudicially love mercilessly walk in goosestep with your god
yippee ki-yay
zeal for your house consumes me
It can’t possibly be what it seems and for that I am thankful.
Thankful too that I have developed object-permanence when it comes to love.
For all the things I don’t know—it’s good to be surrounded by them; it's like sitting in a library.
I like music and I am thankful there are so many musical sounds: for instance the toned ping of a stone kicked into the water and the warble of its echo from the underside of the bridge.
I am thankful for peaches and for goldfinches blintzes pince-nez and I am grateful I can play a few musical instruments. To arrange sounds for friends is wonderful!
I am thankful to my friends for being my friends even to those friends who have stopped being my friends. To plunge my hands into the running water of friendship and to see their faces and to see my own face with them in the stream!
There are places I have never been and I am thankful I don’t have to go to all of them. When you are 20 years old you can get a call at 2 in the afternoon that your shift has been cut and by sunset you can be two states away. And now of course by the time you have had the car serviced and finally gotten that job with yearly vacation days in writing you find yourself looking appreciatively at the cemetery alongside the highway—and you're not even out of Ohio.
For comforts of course although I have a feeling I should be less comfortable. All the best thankers seem to go without food and sleep. They thank in jail and in line at the DMV. They thank for enemies and illnesses. I am thankful that I am not one of the best thankers.
I am of course thankful for all the things and people I should be thankful for but I am thankful that no one holds my feet to the fire demanding I list them all.
I am thankful for my wife in a way that embarrasses me. It probably embarrasses her too.
Sometimes I hear a song from an app on my phone and I like it so much I imagine someday meeting the singer maybe in an airport passing each other going the other way and I call out Thank you for writing and singing that wonderful song! and the singer looks at me like I am crazy. It is not crazy to be thankful but it might be crazy to have a relationship with a work of art and therefore suppose I can have a relationship with the artist. I am thankful for the app on my phone that plays music.
Can you be thankful without thanking Someone in particular? There are people I know who will insist that it’s my own act of thanking that implies that capital S. As if the Tetragrammaton is somehow present in the word thanks. It's not. But Tanakh is. I am thankful for all the places God hides.
Sobriety is a real gift to me and people who encounter me would be thankful for it if they had ever known me drunk. I don't hold with the O Happy Fault way of looking at things but I am thankful that I don't have to hate the younger man I see when I look back over my shoulder.
Today I am thankful for memory the hyperlinked page of my life. Your life too. After all we are written in the same book.
I am thankful that when I die I will share whatever death is with all the people who have died many of them so unfairly.
O Numberless
O Ordinal
O Nameful
O Gender's Unend
O Pronoun
O Factory Settings
O There There
O Refuser to Define the Terms
O Not Composed Of
O Positionless
O Lungs
O Resonator
O Breath
O Mirror
O Cardiopulmonary Resuscitator
O Near-Death Experience
O Hidden
O Originator
O I-Within-Me
O I-Apart-From-Me
O Hold-Togetherer
O Disrespector of Philosophies
O Gatherer
O Scatterer
O Planted Memory
O Field of Study
O Vintner
O Prodigal
O Promiscuous
O Whose Is the Sea
O Pursuer
O Jealous
O Lier in Wait
The One We All Talk About
The One We Look Like
The One Who Asks Us To Face Death
The One We Are Afraid Of
The One We Are Not Afraid Of Enough
The One Who Is One
The One Who Lives
The One Who Sees in Secret
The One Who Favors Long Hair
The One With a Strong Right Arm
The One After Whose Heart
The One After Whom My Heart
The One Whose Wings
Who Can Tell You What To Do?
Who Can Light Enough Candles For Your Birthday Cake?
Who Can Be Perfect As You Are Perfect?
Who Can Love Wine More Than You Do?
Who Can Love Blood More Than You Do?
Who Can Love Me More Than You Do?
Who Can Beat You at the Staring Game?
Who Can Beat You at the War Game?
Who Has Lost More Children Than You?
Who Else Can Get Up Early Enough to Walk Leviathan Before the Rest of the House is Awake?
The Elephant in the Room
The Something in the Water
The Savoir-Faire
The Joie de Vivre
The Rub
The Matter
The Stuff That Creeds Are Made On
The Brass Ring
The Alfa Romeo
The Honey in the Rock
The I in Team
My Deemer
My Redeemer
My Own
We were just as we were, without understanding, when the atmosphere turned violent.
The fall colors were like bruises the day after and because of the holiday the day after that.
Who will be the first to take advantage?
I wish I had a manila envelope to offer.
The Mackinac Bridge, the Pontchartrain Causeway, the fear of momentous crossings.
She makes the trigger-pulling motion, but she is not holding a gun.
A tumbler of gin is imaginable when the trembling is again unmanageable.
Mortality settles it for me.
Death at scale is comforting, because it throws the individual into relief.
You can follow the stream back to where it emerges from under the jutting rock.
I'd like the sky to have enough stars for me to feel satisfied. Something to shoot for anyway.
A voice counts down from some number I missed to zero.
The vocabulary of desire is not enough. I want more.
The problem with solving a problem is that now you are stuck with your solution.
It's not done, of course, but romance is recoverable.
We could walk along the edge of the water, where everything is doubled and you can decide what things mean.
Does your face have your back?
I would like to revisit someone else's memories of the occasion.
Once in a while something happens between me and a work of art that neither of us seems to have seen coming.
Money, but there are only so many games I can play.
The sun was removed from the sky, as when we wash penguins after a spill.
In spite of, we go on, even lightly.
Obvious things (like what I should be doing)
lie here and there, and you can’t clean the carpets.
Tangled in subtleties of towel sets,
the dress that didn’t dance with us, my darling.
The books we didn’t read, the DIY
projects gone bad, romantic attempts at freedom
from debt—good lord the longing for a fiefdom
of owned land, muddy children, a starry sky.
It’s never late enough, though, for a change.
The candle burns, the gutter runs with filth,
the train tracks never move but disappear.
Your neck, the way you wear the color orange,
I want it too, that thing you want, the myth
that anger is reducible to fear.
We ache neither here nor there but indirectly.
Because of the fall you might think but often the fall
is caused by the break. It's the way the mind works.
First something happens. Then we lie about it.
At least the solipsists are only hurting themselves.
It was a small room, as if the -m in motel stood for mini.
The corner of the bed — where I was sitting —
the closet door that wouldn't stay closed, and the light
from around the edge of the curtain formed an angel,
and I knew. Andrew was angry when I told him.
He called me a quitter and was dead within a year.
I Was a Teenage Phenomenologist
The 1986 Ford Taurus at the time seemed to me the first to take corners
out of cars, the previously boxy design of which had been so comfortable
I could dispense with experiencing the essence
of the parked and moving cars I navigated on my bike.
Familiar things become stand-ins for themselves,
stuntpersons, getting the job done without bringing in any personhood
of their own. Could I ever have learned to ride the bike if I were confronted
at every moment with the I-Thou of existence encountering existence?
No, I think to myself as I continue staring at the Ford Taurus,
imagining an artist at a drafting table and repulsed
by the slippery contours—oil-skinned, algae-clouded, pond-like.
I walked through the alleys then, my feelings hurt as they were frequently at 14,
and the alleys became a little more the world that stands apart from me,
the world whose thousand eyes were always trying to catch my eye,
which I would hide by turning inward. But to encounter within yourself
the standing apart, to stand apart from yourself, that is the most terrible.
The leaderboard does not disclose the door through which
like pomegranate seeds the prismed light drops from beveled courtyard windows
in the months when the students are still hopeful about accessibility. Desire surfaces
for a zucchini from the garden cut into coins and squeaking in the skillet with salt—
grains as big as the fictions of her childhood, sacrificed now because
there is not even a field for text entry, only a choice of radio buttons.
The vision of the far-off predisposes her to choose. The rest is reactionary.
Naiveté and nostalgia link arms, casting a net of guidance vectors over the deep,
where every lumpen thing we’ve wanted howls.
Through the waving linens drying in the wind the neighbor’s fence
and over that an oak higher than the roof peak
provide a tiered platform on which to mark my progress.
What does he think. But what does he do.
A billionaire. Incubators to interplanetary.
Glass beakers of percolating coffee catching the light
of the southern panorama. The hydroponics whir.
Positive pressure keeps pollutants out.
If only human beings. But they're not.
Raw materials are so subduable.
Our most valuable resource rarely questions
who is us. Yet they may rise up. They do periodically.
Fixate on time is what he does. Move to the beep.
Hanging outside the bay window on a wire, a feeder
for the small organ he has yet to locate
inside himself, the part that hums
without his consent or understanding.
Where I work a guy last week lost his finger.
The station in front of me’s feeder caught hold of a woman's hair.
Manager’s got a framed picture on his desk of a truck on fire—
In it you can see the future:
the driver's wife telling him on the phone it's too dangerous, there're other jobs,
and he's listening, but then he sees the mesquite tree too near the wreck
go up all at once,
a pillar of fragrant smoke rising above the carcass.
The holiness fills him, the preordained inevitability,
and he knows he'll never leave.
In the movie I am thinking of that I can’t believe you haven’t seen
a woman’s face recedes. A bomb has exploded and she has lost everything.
There is a shared experience in the dark in the comfortable seats surrounded by strangers
which adds to the meaning of the scene of the woman’s face receding.
The woman’s face is the felicitous consciousness of our own mortality,
which frees us from the dukkha of the moment and the dukkha of desire,
the consciousness which recedes and recedes again as often as we think we possess it.
There is nothing felicitous about a woman whose child has been killed by a bomb.
Watching the bombs fall on TV and seeing the faces of the killed children on our phones
is frightening and outrageous and alienating and lonely and awful.
But you should see this movie. It is masterfully done.
The woman is worn down to nothing by the constant death around her,
and that speaks so eloquently to our daily experience, don’t you think?
Come with me to the movies tonight. We will regulate our experience.
It's what the coin must live for,
that tumble toward the apogee, scattering light
like an angel, eyes around anxious for the descent.
(Another word for fortune is doom.)
That gambling is a sin
never enters its mind, I’m sure.
It never did mine, back when every action I took
was ordered to the destruction of human society.
When the coin lands, its face is revealed
to be dull. There is only government and labor,
the smelter and the press. Such difficult origins,
and nothing to look forward to but to be passed around.
I’m on the other side of things now, blessed be God,
but I know what it feels like to be looked at,
to arouse morbid and lascivious fears—
it feels good.
J-T Kelly is an innkeeper in Indianapolis. He lives in a brick house with his wife, their six children, his two parents, his brother, and a dog. New chapbook, More of How to Read the Bible, coming soon from above/ground press.
