Hammer and Membrane
There’s a field of diamonds in my
court-ordered chew toy,
but will you abide by the terms of the
exciting announcement or putter
like foreign cryptids into mayonnaise
fart control?
The unbearable whiteness of being the
abominable Roman
aqueduct with exorcist fluid dynamics
and alchemy that transubstantiates
accountants into the body and blood of
amnesiac venture capitalists.
Make me one everything app with
samsara and I will fill
the comments sections of manosphere
message boards with enough
art education majors to rupture your
healing breakfast.
That’s less a promise than a happy
brisket with bone sauce
and harmonious copaganda. What about
prowess? Ketamine?
Singularity? It’s all transgressive
like the first day of teenage classics
when the sales force actualized via a
massive gathering of
wedge pillows deep in the under-ear of the
premiere tycoons.
Anti-Vacuum
Got the luxurious conventional sell-out
marriage blues,
and every anarchist is eating soup with
a fork.
Got the Ray-Bans for vampire freedom
and Orlok
fucks up your borders like a popularist
polling tax credits
for plague ships. Leverage customer
data for astral spirits
and let naïve cynicism register your anti-establishment
branding
till you get overdetermined by large
language model blues.
I can’t quit you, gravy, but I’ve got
to put you
in my Venmo for a while. Clapton snorts
smallpox till Madame
George rings the bell for meaty
Englishness. Channeling
art theft. But the good kind, where you
don’t have to
mark them down a grade. Just-in-time
production of multipolar
cosmic vastnesses—is it infrastructure
week already? We’ve
learned so much from the decadent
nobles and their dick pics.
You Must Read to Write
I.
The mind is a garden of wild and whirling words
that must be watered
with the themes of English B.
Or possibly
I have no inner resources.
Just an inner frog
that bellows “Marilyn Chin! John Berryman!”
through the wild and whirling slog
of footnotes and hyacinth. I am a real poet
like John Cusack with the boom box and the
gimlet eye
fixed like a lake on which wild ducks fuck
under Alderaan’s moony sky.
II.
The mind is its own place and in itself, like
Godzilla devouring a film about Godzilla.
Godzilla teeth caught on the projector that
reflects odd aspects of Godzilla.
Maybe he got Ray Bradbury. You have to hope
like feathers turning into dinosaurs turning
into a savage servility
of yapping Cyclopean chinchillas.
They don’t mean to eat you but they do
from within, like Alien.
You can’t give birth to xenomorph Oedipus if
there is only you in your epiglottis
bursting forth in a veil of viscera. Not waving
not drowning
just floating in id and the turbid ebb and flow
of those who are Mostly Good,
or at least better than you.
III.
I would not be a poem
but a blurb.
Unread, unwritten
and difficult to love.
If I had met you everything would be different.
My bowels would work better.
And the trees would have all their petals
stapled on. Or glued. The Macbook would work.
There would be a gilded table in a gilded room
where we would meet regularly. The coffee would
be good.
And you would gesture ineffably towards a
publishing deal.
I would hold it in my hand, a lily
with all the attachments.
Instead I have only a pot of bad bread
and op-eds grating in my hands like severed
teeth.
There is nothing to do but insult my image
which hangs there, a bat upside down,
holding its wings like a blanket of sticks.
It calls and the echo is the approximate shape
of me falling
from myself into a better approximate shape
sewn by you from porcelain
and grant money.
This Is the Forest Primeval
You have to know form before you can
break the form
as if there is one form to fit and the
world
Is built out of busts of Mozart
stacked one on top of the other, so
that they form
a really big Mozart bust.
Then ten thousand years from now
they fall over and crack apart into a
fractal mass
that looks exactly like the bird poop
spackled on the eye of Mozart.
That is the form you must learn there
in the ditch
where the worms excrete perfect
castings
and laugh in their wormy way
“Ooooh, isn’t that a long fellow?”
Noah Berlatsky (he/him) is a freelance writer in Chicago. His first poetry collection, Not Akhmatova (Ben Yehuda Press), is forthcoming; chapbooks published or forthcoming include It's Fab (Origami Poems Project), Send $19.99 for Supplements and Freedom (above/ground) and No Devotions (LJMcD Communications). He tweets too much at @nberlat and scribbles longer at Everything is Horrible (https://www.everythingishorrible.net/).