Surviving You Always
Here are kilowatt hours measured from the luster of a dozen spark plugs firing. Termites drive this engine within a scorched toy clanging gongs along the floor of a porn theater. Welcome to this fragile glass gangland. Here, a knife can be a vehicle. Drive it through a foe. Foil tiny muggers. Drug bloodborne murderers. Swim in an ocean of pills. When a chair is a weapon, it’s not surprising to find the room full of darning eggs and coughing. Yes, we will wear our infants in their slings everywhere, even in knife fights, even in tilt-a-whirls. Yes, my iron lung sings. And yes, it’s in the key of X to please the queen. And yet, it appears everyone here just wants to claim their spun sugar crowns can’t stand up to a buffing. See figure 4.1. It depicts three life-sized angels sleeping inside a tiger, its captors tormenting it with paper airplanes in a cage. Then the coal cars’ clacking subtracts the blackbirds from the calibrated miles of a racehorse’s veins. Add a clef. Measure a sentence by its circumference. The die back is almost done now. A thousand false eyelashes cover the framework of the fans you use in a burlesque dance. Once again, four brothers are picking off tiles lined against the marquee above a movie theater. If a bright furriness blinds you, then it might be your guide beyond a cabin through the woods with fireworks blooming two by two above you. Wooed, you swoon. The fourth lark flew from the baby’s throat into the wishing well, where neon lightning strikes a skeleton key, the inventor of suspicion. Why? Because every good boy deserves a goat inside him. So mom, you wanted to ask me then, is in an animal again?
Brennen Wysong's poetry has appeared or are forthcoming in Fou, Denver Quarterly, Fourteen Hills, The Corduroy Mtn., Word For/Word, GlitterPony, New CollAge Magazine, Spring Formal, Bateau, Copper Nickel, 42opus, and other journals. I live in New York City with my wife, Debra, and son, Calder Birch.
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