Newsflash Under Fire, Over the Shoulder
I am feeling mostly groggy,
most beatific, most feelings
To date. I am feeling theory
Failed me where I needed it
Most to counter starlight. So it went
Without saying I lacked the digits to
index every connection that arose in
the haze of my gleaning the cleanest
Image of facefulness. Faith, it goes without saying.
Any which way it faceth. And that might modulate
Behind screens how pixelate spiders across granite
columns, so waves across waves across my summary
Of conundrum in my inner-inner ears (my other eyes)
(Should it concern my medical history, my genealogy
Is borning. Excuse the maladjustment of my disguise)
Say, “It was simple until it wasn’t,
Until we were older than we knew
How to be, and until we grew tired
Of apprehending swiftly our gusto.
Kabobbed on a rising spire, northing polis circumspect
Of being well within feeling out of season.
An assembly of flags bobbing on the canal
Of some great city’s wheelhouse. Our four
Sets of eyes to the beauty unawake though
all finally at the same time openly coordinating
blinks, if not to the idea of to play, then to plea.
The feelings they stood for at war
With the reasons for feeling them. Say “repeat.”
Now repeat after me: Simon says ‘I’.
Aye, aye, Simon, Assurance stutters.
We the people conflate into peopling
For dedications to our untranslatable
Banality of harping on the one string
Of untranslatability, of readjusting bi-
Focals to a many-mooned University
Degree I earned barely by disguising
my skin in Skin. The convenience of
Statement, That. Of a rudder to drape
An arm over, and so the river system,
Hacked Littered Ransomed Headline.
Of whatever rug you pull out the body
Of the concept rolled to white in flour. I’ll be there
In the dump slamming charity tournaments
document preening every letter for any um,
word of prey save one bird of re:lettres, “I”
My lasting intervention the complexion, this:
When spilled my hand into sawdust and rose
Into garage my own steam. The lone packing
Peanut unsure if to cling to the finger offends
its being. Insofar as it does I cry into a pillow
into two muffled languages, knead their fluid
-filled cyst. Insofar as it doesn’t, I assure you,
I’m not crying. ‘I am not crying,’ I somesing.”
Gently, through a two-inch opportunity, in breezes
Tolerance to debase your plotlines. The machinery
Winds down into embryonic respite on the shelves
Into seed-hum from a higher-branched honeycomb
of two-inch opportunities percolating consequence,
mattering more from great heights at global angles.
Leagues away, a personal dispatch among debris
In their motherland : people step out of their cars
And peer ahead at the honks at the peering ahead
to the event. The event : its own vision of concern.
The event the demist
In the clearing street.
We the faceful desist
The somnambulance
Muttering to ourself,
We could have lived!
Jed Munson lives in Seoul. His debut chapbook, Newsflash Under Fire, Over the Shoulder, is forthcoming with Ugly Duckling Presse.
