May 28, 2015

#finalpoems / [?]

opened to death ?

No news. Here, no longer held what I once knew. Thirsting away.
Distant cries trapped in silence. They changed nothing. And my
surprise? Words I was not counting on. The falling apart through my
flesh. Laid bare, without trembling. Stinking. Everything begins to
die. I say death without knowing what it means. And whisper of things
of which I cannot utter. I forget. If I had a memory, might it tell me of
an end? My appearances are elsewhere. Drawn from darkness, breath
fails. The pain stronger. Impossible to stop. Hesitating, I ask where is
life? There is no answer. I open my palm. The gaze of doubt faces me,
I do not listen to it. An encounter: not something that arrives; nothing
to reflect the joy of living; receding, never to be stirred from here.
Turning my face – I weep. What makes me weep? The calamity: this
moment, this body I die in. Afterwards, it will not be me anymore. No
thing saddening; nothing to be done; no-body longer. Without a sound,
no more questions

this, then that –
urine, feces, voice(s)
merging out –
when my organs of love disappear
when time has no time any more

~ louis

05
24
15

#finalpoems / [?]

no
future
is
still
a
future

#finalpoems / [?]

If it were to all end tomorrow, I don’t know whether I would weep, what I would weep for, whether I would weep at all.

Clear   dusk   dusking       clouds.

The sky erupts and the plodding timeline is what occupies our minds, that is, we don’t know what to concern ourselves with when the shallow indentations of the cosmos, so distant, awakened, closer now, and to remain lost.

My final poem is not a poem because I don’t know what a poem is anymore.

When everything around me is crumbling — treacherous accusations, uneraseable footprints, scarred hollows in the ground — when everyone I know will soon be dead or is already dead, I hardly have words. I hardly know how to use them. I can hardly speak, weeping. I have forgotten how to weep, and my weeping, this is weeping, never weep again.

I have words for weeping, this is weeping, yet these are words, these are my words. A kind of rotten feeling, stray, I’m a little on edge. Somewhere, that place exists, will exist, will never exist again.

When I wasn’t looking, someone painted clouds in the sky and I notice that the sky is still blue but every moment I wonder what color it will be the next moment the next moment the next moment tomorrow the day after the day after that the day when I can no longer look at the blue or unblue sky. What color will the sky be?

One might be stiff with terror. One might have turned to stone. One might be overwhelmed. One might ponder what is deserved or undeserved, look for confirmation of deserved or undeservedness.

You’re dead. You’re already dead.

What do dying people do with their time?

I wonder about the distance between myself and the sky. The distance between my body and the sky, the distance that is unmeasurable, the distance that is necessary, the distance that will remain even when we are no longer here. When we are no longer here there will be no one to witness the brunt of our hatred, the brunt of our love, the brunt of our indignation, the compassion we once held for each other under our hardened souls.

The world will remember, the world will not remember, the world will no longer be.

When I die, I want to be filled with love. I want to be filled with love for those I love, for the world that held me, even as it died, even as I lay dying, for my mother, whom I want to remember until the final moment, for my dogs because they are my dogs.

When you die I want you to remember memory. I want you to remember how it was to remember, to remember the world as a beautiful place, to remember the world as an ugly place, to remember the world we lived in, to remember the world in which we live now, the world this world, because we knew no other world.

When I die I want to remember the shape of the moon, the brilliance of the sun, the color of the sky when the sun is setting. I want to remember your face, my face, my mother’s face, my dogs’ faces. I want to remember how it feels like to be happy. I want to be happy one more time, I want to feel happiness. When I die I want to remember sadness, I want to remember how it feels like to be sad, how I felt when my mother died, how it feels to lie on the ground as it rains, heartbroken.

When you die I want you to remember how it feels like to feel, how it feels like to feel anything, because more than anything you will no longer be here the world will no longer exist and you will no longer feel what it means to feel to feel to be a human being to feel to never feel anything again.

When we die, let us lock hands one more time, to once more grasp onto another human being. When we die let us look up at the sky to remember that brilliant blue the blue that held us and holds us still and will continue to hold us even when we are no longer here.

Blue   sky   dusking    out.

I got something wrong. I got so many things wrong.

Isn’t it all a relief?

Today I see a little gray dog with his head sticking out of a car window, feeling the breeze and the air, an utterly content and joyful smile on his face. This is perhaps one of the happiest things I have ever seen.

Today I asked myself, if the world were to end, would I want to die before my dogs or would I want them to die before me. I thought, it will be too painful to watch my dogs die before me. Then, I thought, I don’t want them to watch me die, that it is too painful to think of them confused and alone without me in a dead and ending world.

I refuse to write a final poem, or, this final poem began when I first wrote down the prompt.

If the world were to really end tomorrow, how would I write a poem to sum up all of my heartbreaks, all of my joys, all of the tender moments and the sad moments and the dull moments and all of the beauty that has existed in my life. Should I choose to remember? Is there too much to remember? Is it impossible to remember anything at the end? Is it impossible to try and remember it all when there is nothing more to come?

I want to open my eyes.

The music is blaring and the sky is dusking and I want to open my eyes.

In this final moment I choose to focus on everything that is good and beautiful in this world. In the final moment. I can’t be certain if this is the final moment, whether the world will end today or tomorrow or many days from now, and because I don’t know I will choose to try and focus on everything that is good and beautiful until the final moment and during that final moment. During the final moment I will hold on to all that is good and beautiful and shut my eyes just for a moment to breathe, then, for the last time, I will open my eyes.

#finalpoems / [?]

Let these words
warn you, keep you, warm you, recall
you in the time that we will never reach
let these words

Michael du Plessos is the author of the chapbook, Songs Dead Soldiers Sing (Transparent Tiger Press, 2007) and the novel, Memoirs of Jonbenet by Kathy Acker (Les Figues 2012). Among other projects, Michael is currently working on a collection of poems about decapitation in film and televison with Janice Lee.

#finalpoems / [?]

MAYDAY

The sky shifted its weight towards the horizon
and the masts of sailboats slipped under
the slouch.
I went to honey bloom
& I fed the wings to an imaginary star.
Could you meet me there? on the star?

In this after-life, I wear something other than my body:
a clear dress with all my organs
swimming where you can see.
We scraped away what was awful
and tried to cling to what was left
with our soft teeth and belligerent questions.

That type of dusk in the suburbs —
it hurts your chest, doesn’t it?

You need to walk home now, but it
is so far away. You should have figured
out the bus schedule. Can you let me know
if you see me in the future? Am I okay?

I feel confused about how to handle
the current weather. It comes down like the crux
of a lever. The insides of a pelican shudder
and love letters fall out. We gather them up
and hold them to our lips. They smell like sun
and roses. Remember? this is how beautiful
and simple our insides are? It’s, like, not even
that hard to make up.

CAVE GIFTS

I want to soothe the sayer. The woman
who writes the books that are impossible.
Reconstructed from the rib
of a whale. Reconstructed from
the rib-bone’s back. The bone
is soot returned to darkness, embers
touched with blood: turned blue, turned black.

The book barely fits. Bits of skin and flesh
and hair spill over. “like trash.”
But: “it’s so cute!”
Tugging on our garments.
And: “ if not this, what?”
But everything is over all the time anyway.

The city is a head of fossils
help up by
whale bones, plants, glyphs dismembering
the air, snipping the sky in half.

Mechanical owls of the afterlife
smoothing the ripped cloth, warm birds of heaven
like so many hands singeing the air
with burnt fingerprints.

What a ghost would want.

The shore hurts
like a bruised arm. You walk
there mending the seams, making us see (sea): the shattered
mirrors — stars — frothing in star-tips –waves
of milk, the sea (see). & we are there.
Together. Already. But Hiding.
From each other. Always. In plain sight.

Michelle Detorie is the author of numerous chapbooks including Fur Birds (Insert Press), How Hate Got Hand (eohippus labs), and Bellum Letters (Dusie). She also makes visual poems, poetry objects, time-based poetry, and curates the public art project, The Poetry Booth. Her first full-length collection, After-Cave, is just out with Ahsahta Press.

#finalpoems / [?]

Hope everyone is trying to have sex this weekend

Hope everyone is out there making the brightest thing

Hope everyone is out there becoming suns or even whatever is brighter

Hope money isn’t trying stop anyone from enjoying this weekend

Hope everyone burns their money before the money can stop them

Hope everyone learns a lesson about burning money

Hope someone loans me money to get through the weekend

Hope you don’t mind if I spend the rest of the weekend growing myself shut

Hope you don’t think of a blossom when you think of growing shut

Chad Redden lives in Indianapolis and at lablablabs.net.