Shiver / Bob Hicok
Nov. 10th, 2020 04:55 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png)
like the Porsche 911 Walt Whitman drove
Probably I hurt your aesthetic feelings.
How I said a thing, how I held a lamp
to the night. These should walk without us—
words, the dark—is perhaps your view
of existence. I can’t know,
you provide no puppet theater,
no tumbling routine for me to engage
in spirited discourse. That a face
comes with every body, and a body
with every name, makes it seem
like we’re the same species,
when a cursory kissing shows how multiform
any one puckerer is. I’m sorry
I’m not the Wednesday or club sandwich
you expected, imagine my surprise
that you’re not the world peace
I really do want, it’s not just a thing
I say to the judges inspecting my cleavage.
If you’ll try again I’ll try again,
however trying we are. “To the puppies” is a phrase
I carry around in search of the context
in which shouting it will change everything.
If you have no such rip-chord, we really
shouldn’t be seen together in public,
for you are the matter for which I
am the anti-matter, and as “Lost in Space”
showed us if it showed us nothing else,
it’s not good for life when they meet,
and I want to do what is good for life,
because I want life to return the favor.
If you’re inside me at the hockey game,
you’re inside the arena
when the winning goal’s scored and octopi
thrown onto the ice. A Detroit thing,
as in Cambodia, they don’t play hockey
or call it Cambodian food, it’s just food,
but if you’re inside me and I go
to Angkor Wat, you see how tourism
destroys the past. This love of ours
has done little for you thus far
in this poem. If you’re inside me
when I write a letter urging my senator
to vote against the death penalty,
you’re ineffectual in your outrage too.
But it feels good, doesn’t it,
when I can’t decide if I need
a four or five inch bolt, to be the voice
inside me saying, does it matter,
as I am the voice inside you saying,
I am the voice inside you, the voice
beside your voice inside you, the voice
holding the hand of that voice,
which is anatomically impossible
though romantically essential. If you
are inside me I am lucky: I am lucky:
therefore you are inside me: that’s called
a proof. I’m serious: I don’t know
what good the death penalty does.
“Cruel and inhuman” sounds like a law firm.
You sound like everything to me.
He put moisturizer on the morning he shot
thirty-three people. That stands out. The desire
to be soft. I could tell the guy from NPR
that's what I want, to be soft, or the guy
from the LA Times, or the guy from CNN who says
we should chat. Such a casual word, chat.
I'm chatting to myself now: you did not
do enough about the kid who took your class
a few buildings from where he killed.
With soft hands in Norris Hall killed.
This is my confession. And legs I think
the roommate said, moisturizer in the shower,
I don't know what I could have done
something. Something more than talk to someone
who talked to someone, a food chain of language
leading to this language of "no words" we have now.
Maybe we exist as language and when someone dies
they are unworded. Maybe I should have shot the kid
and then myself given the math. 2 < 33.
I was good at math. Numbers are polite, carefree
if you ask the random number generators.
Mom, I don't mean the killing above.
It's something I write like "I put my arms
around the moon." Maybe sorry's the only sound
to offer pointlessly and at random
to each other forever, not because of what it means
but because it means we're trying to mean,
I am trying to mean more than I did
when I started writing this poem, too soon
people will say, so what. This is what I do.
If I don't do this I have no face and if I do this
I have an apple for a face or something vital
almost going forward is the direction I am headed.
Come with me from being over here to being over there,
from this second to that second. What countries
they are, the seconds, what rooms of people
being alive in them and then dead in them.
The clocks of flowers rise, it's April
and yellow and these seconds are an autopsy
of this word,
suddenly.