Stars
What I Wanted to Say Before
Gung-Ho Contingency Plan
after Sang Ke
You have seen the stars, congratulations.
Forgetting the stars is life.
Cinnamomum toast?
Lobular camphor magazine?
In sleep, the secret scars,
the scabs that can’t be cuticled off.
Authoritarian spit.
The fog is the oyster catcher.
Just because a joke contains the truth
doesn’t mean the lantern burns
in the mouth. But that bright thing
is the bait. What makes you exhausted.
Happy spring, a festival of mosquitos,
a carefully swaddled timebomb.
Beauty is like pulling your socks on
but quiet is a rare poppy.
What is your aspiration?
No, not really, at this moment.
I wanted to say the wind sleeps inside a giant skull
but that's just silly. I wanted to say
when you touch me on the cheek it makes a sound
but I could never tell what kind of sound it was.
I wanted to put my arm around you but you were standing
too far away. I wanted to say “too far away” and not
“on the other side of the room” and so I did.
I wanted to say the window was open like an eye on the world
but it was not specific enough so I left it out.
I wanted to say I didn’t exist—to see what it might feel like.
I wanted to put on heart-shaped sunglasses and drive a convertible
like a bombshell up the California coast
but I burnt my toast and started swearing and broke my hand.
I wanted to say your shoe’s untied before you tripped down the stairs
in front of your students and cracked your forehead open.
I wanted to say “silent drum” and so I have many times
but I've not quite gotten it right. I wanted to
be a woman in the shower and a man in the sun
but I could never be one and was stuck being the other.
I wanted to say language like La la la loo!
but my son said it first. I wanted to say something,
anything, right into your mouth, which I thought
would be sexy but I hiccoughed instead.
I wanted to say there was a dove outside
but it's the twenty-first century for crying out loud.
I wanted to say let's get more wicker furniture
not! I always wanted to say “not!” in a poem.
I wanted to swing from the foliage in the moonlight
like all good poets do. I wanted to blackbird
and I wanted to nightfall. I wanted to craft some clouds
at dawn and I wanted to say don't close the door
I'm right behind you, but I was staring at the ceiling from the floor.
Scrambled hair and kung fu eggs, I stand
inside the gung-ho winter morning sun.
When it succumbs to the guttural rain
the devil takes off his shirt and grabs his wife
by the hair. But I am thinking of another woman
whose consistently stockinged toes land in
my thighs whenever I close my eyes.
The mind, with its accelerated cost
recovery systems and calendar effects,
requires such contingency plans, no?
The cross elasticity of demand
collaborates with sordid dual distribution
avenues. One's inventory turns—
even the guttural rain could be the jobber
pitching the ideas to increase your market
share. Net Present Value. Not Invented
Here. Product Life Cycle. Love, like breakfast,
is profit before interest and taxes—
when I cup those stockinged feet in hand
and thumb them up and down, it's less a sales
forecast than a disaster recovery plan.
Scott Keeney is the author of Sappho Does Hay(na)ku (Sephyrus 2008). His work has appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Court Green, failbetter, Juked, Mudlark, New York Quarterly, Poetry East, Shampoo, and others.
