CAConrad

(Soma)tic Poetry Exercise

& Poem

MINDING THIRST

--for Jamie Townsend

Watch weather report for heavy rain.  On the day before, drink NOTHING.  No beverages of any kind.  Eat no soup or broth.  Eat only steamed vegetables with soft noodles or bread.  Wait for rain.  Set your alarm to wake in the middle of the night, and then sit by the window peering into the dark sky with binoculars.  Think about your first memory of being thirsty.  Take notes, go back to sleep.

Wait for rain.  You are still not drinking the next day and you are very thirsty.  When rain arrives sit by the window.  Close your eyes, take your pulse, hear the rain, feel your blood.  Imagine that the water you hear coming to earth will never touch your lips, can never quench the dryness that is your mouth.  Were you ever so thirsty that you were in pain?  Open your eyes, take notes.

Go out into the rain.  Lie on the ground.  Look into the sky through binoculars with your mouth open.  Drink DIRECTLY from the air while watching the streaming drops fall onto the binocular lens.  Open an umbrella and take notes to the beating of rain.  You are a drought that is cured.  You are a body sponging back your life.  Shape your three sets of notes into one poem or three.

QUA THIRST

I was thirsty in

1976 on our way

      to a bicentennial picnic

    35 years later we

 eat burritos

 become sad

tears of the cook

got into the rice and beans

      most afternoons weepy

        priests eat here

           mourning their cocks

           my suggestion of

           castration upsets

           everyone who fail

to consider

my concerns

KNOLL THIRST

bread asks

body to hold its

measurement of worth

             crane my

   neck back and

        forth on telephone

       glance at suit of

       cards for their

       sharpened edges

skid marks of

       fatal crash

      visible for months

there it is

there it is

      oh my god there it is LISTEN LISTEN

       I’m getting a tattoo of

                  your face on my

             ass to show

       you every time

    you say goodbye

NECRO THIRST

it’s hurting

me get out of

my house if you

        don’t hate death as

       much as I do

          fuck you and your

          smug Buddhist calm

               alchemy of thorns

          from kind intentions

          it’s none of your

          business if I trick

   the doorman into

              thinking I’m

   his wife he

       wrote my name

       in a heart as

  though I didn’t

ask him to

CAConrad is a recipient of a 2011 Pew Fellowship in the Arts. He is the author of A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon (Wave Books, 2012), The Book of Frank (Wave Books, 2010), Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled The City Real & Imagined (Factory School, 2010). The son of white trash asphyxiation, his childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. Visit him online at http://CAConrad.blogspot.com