Monday, August 11, 2014

2 poems || Howie Good

Pointless Weirdness

1
Whatever is obsolete is free for the taking. I have a box full of photographs I've taken of clouds! The process is one of clinging to outlaw fragments floating around me. Pointless weirdness gets old fast, but I can’t help myself. Buddy Holly looked right at my mother at the show in Duluth three days before the plane crash.

2
While waiting in the express lane (a serious misnomer!) at the supermarket, I study the candy rack and then the magazines, my eyes catching on the cover of People, even though none of the names in the megawatt rainbow lettering are familiar to me, or their disembodied faces either, and I’m struck, not for the first time, by our casual insertions into ideological circuits, but mostly by the fact that I’m somewhere on the fringes of an ever-moving mass, like the sick and the weak and the slow, easy meals for lions and hyenas.

3
We stop in front of the stained glass of Abraham raising the knife. Who is that, you ask, Elijah? The exhibit goes on for another five white, sterile rooms. Behind every work of art lies an uncommitted crime, Abraham grasping Isaac’s hair. It’s the season’s hottest trend, an ongoing crisis of representation, populated by ghosts and old men. I have a hole in my head I want you to fill with a tongue kiss.



Fire Is the Other Animal 
A collage based on Heather S.J. Steglia, Water Runs To What Is Wet (Burning Deck, 1980)


I live in the reign
of sparrows

Bird tracks
make circles
in my palms

What isn’t is

We have left
bones in the forest
& dark swans
under the water

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