Hesse

A Fridge for a Brain.

1. 

'Tetherball'

I play tetherball with the sun

My eyes bulge

They become fuselage

And explode

And I am left with what they call reality

A fever of colors

Nature sounds on a steely phonograph

The clouds on corked loop

With a ceiling crayoned vein blue

Stretching its back

Like a medallion w***e in a sweaty downtown hop

Where everyone is everyone else’s favorite nobody

But all I can do is finger the trigger in the back of my mind

Because I can’t afford another night

Not like this

No, not like this.

 

2. 

'Candle Water'

Haven’t they heard of beauty?

Don’t they know?

The stars drip electric water

And I let it run through my fingers

Like a fresh nightmare into the cobweb mother of a beaded dreamcatcher

But they are too busy- busy, busy, busy

With their French maid outfits and their typhoid romances

And their bubble gum and their amusement parks

And their reality TV and their cubicles

And their diplomas and their treadmills

And their taxes and their shiatsus and their banks

And their indie bands and their warts

To see

That a grain of sand knows more then the windows of our greatest cities

And it needed no hands, no thoughts, and no machines

To become

And to be.

 

3. 

'Open Sore'

I am not a poet

I am not a cynic

I am not Polynesian

I am not in love

I am just an open sore

And my heart is a pallid blister

On the lip of an ancient lake.

 

4. 

'Symphony'

I wish I could gut their glass bulbs and electric fires

Because the stars are out tonight

A symphony of the ages

And I’d rather not miss another chord

For the sake of their garage warfare-

 

5.

'Blood and Bones'

I am cold but not miserable

Because it’s so real

And I shake like the head of a typewriter

Conducting its own novelistic Trail of Tears

Or a wind chime begging for sleep in the astrodome of another wicked Viet Monsoon

But it’s beautiful

And I’ve never been more reminded

That I am nothing but blood and bones-

Blood and bones.

 

6.

'Skinny Pieces'

My dreams look like a smoker’s lungs

Or a vase with nothing but dead petals at its Jesus feet

And I am left grinning

And aging

In another one you’re your lovely nightmares.

 

7.

'Dead Well'

So this is how we measure moments

By giggling for suggestive Facebook pictures

And blowing out our eardrums with too many microphones and oversexed guitars

By circus hopping keg stands and beer bong and Red Stag and perfume and used condoms

And drowning our seconds in a lopsided mirage of Freudian pleasure and Platonic pain

Oh or am I perhaps lonely and morose and charcoal grey

With nothing but acidic feeling

Like a wishing well in the corner of a world without life.