Matt Hart
WATERWORKS
It’s cloudy for sure
is a metaphor, because
today the sun is blaring
its incandescent awareness
of its own burning insistent galactics
and a complete indifference
to the nuthatches and the macadamia nut
advertisements and the hospice workers
and the half-naked young people
deluded about the idea
that anybody actually sees them.
I know that no one does,
because I conjured them
out of a text message
from a friend to try
and dispel his heavy heart.
But apparently, that’s not,
as they say, in the cards,
because the cards are babies
crying satellites and chipmunks
wrecking giga-coasters and pink
froth coming out her mouth
like foam geraniums
nestled into the pocket
of a tuxedo. You don’t need to know
who she is, and I don’t know
who “they” are with the cards.
I don’t know who the smoke is
in my lungs. I think the human heart
is a monster, and the sun is just a pulse,
and when the clouds move in
they move in concretely
and all you can do
is follow them with your eyes
and try not to be bulldozed
by the shadows
and the glint-light.
There’s probably more
to say, because words
collude with us to make us
just especially what we mean,
but I get tired of saying things.
I get tired of reinventing the bionics
of poetry, the electronics of love,
the scattershot dysphoria
of what is and what goes.
Everything goes.
Everything eventually.
The wings on my back
drip buttermilk tangentially,
and no one’s the wiser
that I’m only a basement,
waiting for the snowshoe
or the hobby horse
to call, waiting
for what passes
to pass me on the highway
and see myself in it,
another storm drain.
LEAFBLOWER
Re-clocked and dragging
on six hours of peas.
Somebody build me
an amplifier out of corpses.
Warbler babies. Blue jay
gutters. I live and breathe
at the level of the phrase
against the line against
the sentence. More happens
than you think when an ambulance
speeds by. Merely by mentioning it
I try the patience of everybody,
most especially my friends, the impatiens,
and my family stacked against me
in the basement that doesn’t leak
since we fixed the gutters
with gargoyles, the blue cheese
with steaks. The stars on the roof
of my mouth call to strawberries.
The sousaphones riding
their bikes hit the hookah.
I hit the brakes on this poem in particular
yesterday when I got the new flanger, but
I guess I’m back to it, if that’s what
this is or calls forth or responds to.
I could break a tooth on a spider
made of Sakrete, or I could strike
a cop in the jaw with a sunrise
egg sandwich to watch the yolk run,
and that begs the question that glows
in the dark. I think I have never used
the word “tampon” in a sentence
before, except in relation to the dog
getting into the garbage. My dreams
are pretty bursts—not exactly sunny,
more like a roof with some sharpshooters
on it, aimed at my earlobe when I try
to help a stranger in need
of a chocolate milkshake. It’s just
that full of weeds in America,
and my body’s as good a candidate as any
for the pyre. One can end up a hare
in a painting with aubergine and nuts. I know
I’m not allowed to say nuts anymore,
as someone might be allergic to the elocution
of an ambiguous insistence on pecans
and macadamia and pine rather than psychos
and assault rifles. All I know is that god isn’t
with us, and your agreement or disagreement
with my content is at best beside the point,
probably in fact useless. Poems
aren’t content any more than the spirits
of murdered children are children
we can hug. I just hugged my own child,
so I know that’s true. Her spirit was
somewhere else entirely. That’s par
for the course when your child
is sixteen and very much alive
in the spirit of the times, where
everything is fucked beyond belief.
PSALMISTRY
I keep my mouth open
in the interest. I foam
where the lips curl
into a derision. If I could envelop
a nebula with envelopes
addressed to planets
in defiance of stars, I would
love you so much more. Dear Mars.
Dear Saturn. Dear Pegasi B.
The tides turn red
and then ready. I walk
with my family in the neighborhood’s
phonebook. We call and call
the whole world to what beats,
scanning the horizon
for the pinch of vaccines.
By pinch I meant oink,
and by vaccines I meant
a piglets. Vociferously
I wander the magic.
Consideration, donut hole.
Maple bacon glazed entrenchments.
We are boats under the fingers
of a titan, who is winded.
My family arrives at the park
after dark. The gigabytes
whiffling the yellow, plastic
bats. But my eyes a little woolier
than action packed these days,
and the generals are taking
the reports quite gracefully,
if not too seriously, so I in turn take it
a little easy temporarily. Someone else
can investigate. We must
get to the bottom
of the macerated lemon.
When does the train go whistling
to the peak? I seem always to miss it
in passing you this note so unremarkably
when I turn the other cheek.
Friend, I am not capable
of performing what is necessary.
I am worrying to a sickness
what knocks against my hull.
I can’t really be sure
if I’ve imagined it or not.
But it seems pretty clear
that I’m wildly off course.
Antelope wires connected
to a clock. The time that I have
in the particles is shorn.
Maybe it’s the side effects
that indicate a phantom, or maybe
it’s the phantom itself
that really hurts. Whatever it is
the Oort cloud confuses my words.
It isn’t the sheep,
it’s the shepherd
who’s lost.
Matt Hart is the author of FAMILIAR (Pickpocket Books, 2022) and nine other books of poems. He was a co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, & Light Industrial Safety from 1993-2019. He lives in Cincinnati where he teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, co-edits the journal Sôrdəd, and plays in the post-punk band NEVERNEW: www.nevernew.net.