consider, and behold our reproach.
––– Lamentations
when I met him he was
a mangy dog crouching beneath the chain link fence
in the limp weeds at the edge of the burned out high school
football field waiting
for the epoch to end
it was something in that dry spotted earth
sunned to death by our faces
which seemed to say here
here is the place where your comrades fell
even though we knew they’d really been
our ugliest foes–––
something about how even the ineffectual
spaces between
toes could rip the ashen roots free
inspired a gut knot manic & awful in
the two of us–––an all new anger, like
I don’t know, I’m so happy it’s
infuriating! someone drive a nail into my skull
to numb this slow scalding clarity!
he walks with me through impoverished
October nights recalled detail for detail from
memory, shining into the dim corners with
grunting & whistling. look at all these grotesques!
I want to paint these picket fences with blood
but I’m lazy and worried about my public record
& won’t do it myself
instead I’m hoping to Tom Sawyer the whole protest
come on over it’ll be fun etc.
people squeezing their torn out hearts
like oozing sponges against peeling wood
in my name, and then gradually
I’ll get bolder
it will escalate:
they’ll find policemen’s heads stuck
on the spiked tops of street signs, the homes
of wealthy tax dodgers burned to the ground
all floor to ceiling windows removed from the walls
of Bourgeois Dogs, shattered & distributed among the people–––
there will be riots &
victory parades all at once
no one will be able to sort it out
it will take this nothing town
decades upon decades
to recover–––!
my soul smashes its fists into the table
splinters it like balsa wood howling
into the cages, all of you!
and I tighten my eyes and
tear at my clothes begging God
for a power like His to incinerate
my enemies my anger & everything–––
knowing it’s happened, yes
it’s finally happened–––
I have spent too much of my blood ink
on literals, long fleshy extensions,
new bricks piling up next to the old cathedral
long before the year Dante
invented originality–––
I could live like the foxes on the dark of
the desolate mountain! but what’s the use
of all this ideology? to resist eternally
resist everything, everything
until you become that white hollow force
you’ve despised so perfectly for so long
that last stage of hated linearity that
no one can look straight in the face
that won’t look a person in the eyes
without poking out its tongue
& winking . . .
when I met him I hadn’t yet gone rotten–––
comrades what do we wish for
any time we blow out the
candles? peace of mind,
peace of mind. well
go on and throw out everything you’ve ever touched
or it will follow you & put
raw tears in your eyes
which will dry on your lids & stick you to
your sunglasses forever–––but the good news is
our whiskey cleanse will cure me
everything squirming & microscopic inside
will be destroyed, and so as per the ritual
he holds my head under the still water
Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues is playing somewhere
miles down the drain–––
terrible that this is how we’ll have to know each other but
now my friend
now we’ll see what you’re really made of
######
Zachary L Pearse lives, works, and writes poems near buildings that used to be factories in New Jersey and spends a lot of time in traffic on local highways. His work has appeared in No Assholes and A Literation, and he is co-editor of Industrial Lunch Magazine.