I Saw This Day Coming

for my students

I saw this day coming class would end and it would be night

time to attach bike lights tonight I lit my way

with a cigarette

I asked if petticoat ding a ling was a fun bar

NO it’s a line from Clairvoyant Journal YOU GUYS WANT

TO PARTY that’s what’s happening here it’s the pneuma of HANNAH

ask me if I like parties

and I’m thrown into turmoil I like parties

that I’m not invited to best lack of riposte similar to when Madeline

Gins asked me if I was a perfectionist

ummmmmmmm

R. said she’s going to sit

in the front row at my reading

let’s try to control our faces

what’s everyone going to be for Halloween

I’m going as my eyebrows

patron saint for the perpetuum mirum

I am amazed!

by the unity of my limbs

and by those for whom “an influx

like eros becomes a concrete personal threat”

PUT IT IN THE POEM

I WANT TO LENGTHEN YOU

if I could morph into a deer

it would be the one on campus

with rhizomatic eyeball

and black socket

I ALONE

am responsible for the content and decorum of my PERSON

O well-ordered ulcer we live in

collectively pointing to a number

on a pain chart

pursing our lips

the smell of burning leaves tonight and their presence in the bird bath

reminds me of New Berlin where 2 old people instilled a work ethic

by connecting neat crayons and fear of a mouthful of soap

perpetuum mirum why would anyone WANT

to hurt me???

I was at a perfect party

no you cannot give edibles to everyone where I smoked

weed outside with Joanne Kyger in the house Antler

with beads of red wine in his beard

told me I was mesmerizing

and I glanced down from the pine

all my moves were acts

of thinking having never

been loved

October 25, 2018

Source: PoetryNow (2019)