Who here’s been tickertape exploited?
Has a fetish for being first? Been drunk & ex-famous
selling cars at the Cadillac dealership
in Beverly Hills? Who here never looks up
because your dead mother looks back
all blue & angelic, the kind of angel-giant
that strode the earth in early Bible deserts?
Good bye, Marion Moon. Goodbye, view.
I stare so bare at the holy light
of the fridge each night. I hold
it open as long as I can until the cold
covers the counters & bowls.
I’m an old soldier no one needs.
Don’t tell me you need me. Who here’s
considered dying in the white fold
of fridge? Goodbye, great gods of sky.
Goodbye, 50 bombing missions
over Korea, the landscape popping with fire,
then smoke, then still again.
I killed them all, I stepped second,
but that’s not the problem.
It’s the seeing. Who here’s seen
people from a bomb’s eye view?
From a tail-gunner’s bubble?
Who here’s blown a kiss to the whole earth
like a lover you can never have back,
& once you think you have,
is not the lover you lost? I broke
into an old girlfriend’s apartment last night.
I called my place from her phone
& heard my message. I said, “I remember you.”
Bill Neumire‘s first book, Estrus, was a semi-finalist for the 42 Miles Press Award, and his second was recently a finalist for the Barrow Street Prize. He reviews books of contemporary poetry for Valium and Verdad.
Appears In
Cagibi Issue 7
