CHILDREN - POWER SPIRIT

A Short Note from Management: New Issue of InDigest Up and Running

The new issue of InDigest is up right now. Contributors include Peter Bognanni, Michael Ogletree, Sougwen Chung, Nicole Callihan, and a conversation between Meakin Armstrong and Sam Osterhout.

It's like Mike Tyson wrestling a tiger, but better. For real. Click here for the awesome.

How Is Your Summer Going?

I'm Not Blind

I don't think, unless, of course,
I am, kneeling here by you,

side-by-side beside the freeway,
which is several things,

including dirty and very big
and is itself side-by-side

another freeway pointing
in the opposite direction

(the traffic, that is, points
since freeways do not point),

the direction from which we came,
I think, and which we are also

currently perpendicularly facing,
when the two are taken together

(that is, the freeways, of course,
not us), being side-by-side,

are full of very fast
and heavy objects,

not that we're not, too,
full of very fast and heavy

objects, I mean, blood and electricity
and the fat organs they rush into,

and there is a constant loud roar
that makes it hard to think

which I almost say out loud
but don't because that's when you say

that this is not any kind
of place for a toy piano,

this is not the place
for a cat or even a child,

it's like no one ever even
conceived of the color green,

to which I don't know what to say
except I heard about a guy

in New York who rescued
a bunch of ducklings from a ledge.

Five Facts About Your Life After the Apocalypse

Seahorses drink blood now.
Other than that it's all
pretty much the same
except nobody remembers you
and the sky looks like
burning phosphorous
and plants smell weird
because they drink blood now.

Ontology Recapitulates Phylogeny

The forest was on fire.
This was a problem

until someone suggested
that instead of a forest,

we should all keep
a real big fire there.

This worked pretty well.
Later, we decided to keep

a big fire in the park, too.
Then in a few homes.

Most thought the nursery
was going too far.

Q: What is the difference
between a mistake

and a foregone conclusion?
A: A river of blood?

A Short Note from Management: Summer Vacation

Adios for a little while, at least.

It's summer now, school is pretty much over, this project has been going for over a year (kind of surpassing my expectations (incidentally, I've also no idea how many people actually read this because my stat counter turned out to be a total piece and I never replaced it with anything else and probably won't ever)), and I would like a little break to work on other projects for a bit.

There will still be the occasional announcement or poem or whatever posted, but probably not anything daily. In the meantime, please do visit the archives. There are more than 400 poems about love and death, rockets, balloons, dread, puppies, thylacines and other apex predators, spiders, burritos, corporate intrigue, maritime adventure, the weather, the cosmos, your mother, and plus also more poems about Whitney Houston than anyone could've reasonably hoped for.

The Last Will and Testament of Brad Liening

I, Brad Liening, of sound mind and body, do wish for the following to be done with, for, and/or to my good-looking and earthly remains:

Regardless of when or how I pass on, be it in a discotheque or haunted house or while operating a fog machine at either these localities of which I was always very fond, I assume my earthly remains will in fact be very good-looking. If a group of close friends and family may look upon my face and body and all agree that my remains are an accurate and positive rendering of my physical prime without much discussion or any party's major objection or dissenting opinion, my body should be displayed in the entrance of the downtown Minneapolis Public Library, like Lenin's, except I should be nude.

If, however, I were to pass on in a horrible fire raging through a submarine at the bottom of the ocean and this way my earthly remains are irretrievable from that second world's deep blue maw and special fleeting vision of hell on earth, a monument not less than fifty feet tall with my eastward-looking face at its apex should be erected in Saginaw, MI. Upon completing construction of this monument, a man, preferably of mildly stooping posture and gait, should be employed nine months out of the year to keep my visage free of bird droppings. Or, a fair number of rubber snakes should be super glued to my giant stone head for the same purpose.

If, however, I pass on while saving stray puppies and kittens from an out-of-control, wildly careening street sweeper that is spitting sparks that hiss to their tiny wet death in the clotted gutters, blue exhaust belching in noxious little clouds, all through the nearly deserted streets of Chicago at 4 am, the lake curving just out of sight, I would like my earthly remains to be buried posthaste under second base in Wrigley Field, an act which would repeal one curse while simultaneously instituting a new and wholly more magical and wonderful curse.

If, however, I were to pass while on the top of a mountain, the following should occur: a fleet of helicopters painted in mourning black should bring my remains down as slowly as the physics of flight allow. The helicopters should play The Rite of Spring at maximum volume, during which small rocks will become dislodged from surrounding mountain faces so that it may appear that the mountains themselves are weeping. Upon landing at the nearest possible airport or USAF base to the grieving, this same fleet of helicopters should then more or less immediately convey my good-looking and earthly remains to the top of another, different mountain that I totally didn't die on, whereupon I should be flash frozen and smashed into a thousand million pieces which are to be buried under a freshly planted raspberry bush or whatever else might possibly thrive at the top of a windswept mountain.

Over and Out

We have no time for this!
is what you may be thinking,

this being talk of your brother,
watching the light break into

shifting yellow lattices on the forest floor,
sunflowers, lawnmowers, roving packs

of the young rediscovering their ability
to walk around barely clothed,

swans, dogs, your childhood dreams
of busting broncos who grow to love you

as you squint hard through swirling
dust versus what you're doing now,

your homework, your dishes,
your conundrum re: reproduction

cycles of the ant and honey bee
and the giant panda and their

own sad little lack thereof
and then relating all this

to yourself and your own life
which is almost always

a pretty bad idea but thing is
you've no time for anything else,

either, not this moment or the next
or the next which even now is gone

and has been for awhile
while all this time your skeleton

has been turning a rich and pretty purple
which deepens almost to black

while someone outside idles the car
and patiently waits to take you home.

Salman Rushdie Is Not My Facebook Friend

That was, ummmmmmmm,
an untruth I told
to get at a larger, more important
and totally true emotional truth,
which is that my spirit animal
is the biggest freaking bear trap
you've ever seen.
It's under these fronds.
It's painted pink.
It's full of mimes
pretending to be cats
fast asleep at your feet.
In reality, though,
these mime-cats are plotting,
their mental wheels turning
so fast the whole thing's
vibrating in place
like a deadly hummingbird.
What is my spirit animal plotting,
you ask?
It involves you!
My cuddly pink
projection of self
is getting ready to talk you into
something so totally dumb
you'll reassess your entire life
not in a bad way,
you'll find yourself driving
a BMW down some
sun-drenched road,
barking into your Bluetooth
when you always swore
you'd never be that person,
never adrift in the deep end
of a fancy in-ground swimming pool,
baking on a blue inflatable raft
with a pitcher of margaritas
at your side,
and suddenly oh no!
you'll wonder if you're the living embodiment
of capitalism's excesses,
and then you'll
just as suddenly spring from the pool
scaring the doves you keep
in tall wicker cages
and whose flaps and squawks
and terrified coos
will echo in your ears
as you strike out into the desert
in search of your own spirit animal
which you will find
hiding under a rock.

Salman Rushdie Is My Facebook Friend

If we were friends in real life,
though, we'd walk together
along a beach
with a metal detector,
switching turns carrying it
when our arms grew tired.
We'd look for change
and lost treasure
and trade jokes
until our shoulders
ached from strain
and were burned by
the setting sun.
Just before nightfall
and before we'd go
in for the evening
to drink from coconuts
and sleep in hammocks
listening to the waves
and the light static
and coordinates spoken
in some unknown language
emitting from
an ancient radio
in the dusty corner,
we'd stumble across
a gun half-buried
in the sand.
We would look at each other
for a few solemn moments,
and the light
would take on
a very different quality.
Then he'd say
something like, "Well,
paradise certainly is
what you make of it,
isn't it,"
before walking on ahead,
his shorts snapping
against his legs
like the flag of
a country with a name
impossible to pronounce.

Sonnet In Which the Couplet Is Removed

It's your guitars and hand claps and hey yeahs,
your hugs and your armloads of purple tulips
that make my eyes shine and heart race so,
and plus also the caffeine in your chocolate
and nicotine alkaloids in your peppers and eggplants,
the Methylenedioxymethamphetamine that speeds blood
through the circulatory system at a higher than normal rate
as I experience increased blood pressure, loss
of appetite, rapid sweating, a dry mouth and throat,
all of which has a nigh potential for abuse since
these compounds inhibit the reuptake of the monoamine
neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine into storage vesicles.

A Few Words Regarding Triage

First you will learn to clean the wound
then you'll learn some go so deep
they won't ever get clean,
all you can do is scrape and scrape and scrape,
fluff the pillows and
refill the drip every eighth night,
which soon enough will come to seem
a sort of penance for when
you were young but not that young,
old enough to know better,
replacing burning bricks
with burning sandbags,
standing ankle-deep in the snow
outside the window of the one person
in the whole city who couldn't care less
about the infection in your hand,
what the third party called
to tell you in the middle of the night
from a certain alley behind a low-rent
Chinese joint full of fog,
how you threw your umbrella into
a puddle and ran the whole way home
where you threw your phone
into a different, smaller puddle,
though the damages amounted to the same,
that is, the nearly comic,
and later you will realize all this
time you've been humming a little song,
oxygen always, always rushing into the flames.