Volume 16 ~ Spring 2004 ~ ISSN 1543-6063

ANSELM BERRIGAN

 

9/21/03

I wanna steal your incense.
Chug the misty bits tracking
our can't remembered minder.
I like it wiped out in place.
The sinucleanse refrain jingling
just beyond ears' reach, oh
everything is green from
the greyhound's view and
strokes distracting the power
of pride don't beg. There's
brains in the pretty tracers
what marked our primitive
springtime. You being my
person keeps me from ransoming
my whole shbang for perma-
wobble presence substitute.
I think we recognize one
another by now. I know
enough to know that.

10/19/03

Trace the call to its mispronuciation
of my name. But I don't care to
call back. They or he calls four times
over two days. Get me on that list.
Now I'm a teetotaler moving across
the social glide with a nondescript
gait. My imbalance is not to articulate
according to clan rules. Or that I just
refuse to see the way through the locks
in private. But I won't let subject matter
acquire such timely distortion beyond
the necessary blasting of what's said
to be real. Said, shown, carved, chopped.
There's a bird in bed and I have to know
it needs to be spoken to with affection.
Tucked out. Belted instruction proffers
ok, crackling under pressure in dips.
Spinners indifference demarcates your
payoff as you stay up to occupy time
as if you're in sync with it. Lame avenues
to bound past meet your habits still
dialing. Games in the spoonfed mystery
of the couch restuffed. Lest daring
be stricken from domicile bereavement.
I have been conducting an interrogation
silently of myself. It is getting nowhere
at a second by second pace. Bed-ridden
voice walks out of the bricks. This
when your eyes are going, and the thank
yous percolate in the jovial room where
the too fast was too long and too good
to notice.

10/23/03

It seems transparent and ghostly now.
You'd sleep through your own work life
to be here with me I'm told. Cross-legged
in black and blue you get to be detached
and declared to be in the way you ought
to be, like you've suddenly mastered
the force and psychotherapy is with you.
You aim to shrink your anxiety and pay
a little to make it happen. You can't
speak in threes or kiss ass despite the
luxury that'd let you. You announce.
It's a stick figure sentence packed with
chameleonic meaning. You would hope
they know you well enough to pull
the plug. You watch over a tree planted
in the backyard of a two hundred year
old building for your sister, or you
mean to. You walk out the door
because you know you have to make
time between calls. You you you.
You make the bad food pit stop
when its will is made felt. You can't
manage a steady tone across every
encounter with a human. You wash,
sometimes. You could relax into the
moment by asking me nothing.

Poems © Anselm Berrigan  2004. All rights reserved.

Duncan Hannah
www.jamesgrahamandsons.com

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