Paul Killebrew

When was being born, I thought,
“There’s really no way this is actually happening.”
Years later, I yelled to a kid across a pond on his bike,
“Hey kid! We’re all just big, big beams of light!”
The night before that I’d met a really old woman
who told me everything I wanted to know about life,
which made me so bored I had to scream,
“I’m so fucking beautiful I can’t even stand it!”

Nobody looked affectionately at the grass during the Civil War
when little black puppies ran around like caffeinated mourners.
All the same little girls paraded by on the backs of all the same dark giants.
Even now their steps sink into my neck like that haiku
about the loveseat beside the lamp that goes:
the loveseat beside
the lamp and the wire runs
underneath them both
Haikus seem complacent today, less like the reality of a reflection,
which can move, than a hole in the ground, which cannot.
If I stopped running now, all of these storefronts
would seem too much like televisions, and I’d start thinking
that those ladies getting manicures are just delicately affectionate lesbians,
but that isn’t naturalism. The problem, as ever, is how to live
without popping off your head like a bottlecap
just because the weather finally expresses your desire to be a better person.
Better, anyway, than yourself and all the horrible things you know to be true.
They don’t matter to anyone else, but still they ring on a line
through the skull strung between the temples,
which are the resonating points of the soul.
Somewhere a little girl is taking yogurt into the family room
while a stiff breeze twists off the edges of a hospital
rising into the clouds like a triumphant shoebox,
and today you have lived wholly inside the drift from how you feel
to how others feel about you. You’d like to forget everything,
and then you do. The sun throws itself into its work and across the sky,
but the moon just hangs there and waits for someone else
to get things going. It doesn’t matter; everyone loves you in France.

Shape of a window on the floor, distant typing,
the horrible pliancy of the afternoon. De Tocqueville says
America will perpetually confuse freedom
and equality and all the people at my office say, Sure.
Some people like to get high, but I go to work to get small.
Real small. You think maybe we could all be friends
of whatever ostensibly meaningless rank,
but then there’s money to embarrass us
and generate awkwardness through a sense of difference
among people who can’t unassign money from accomplishment,
even the arts are plastered with thousand dollar bouquets
for best indeterminate sigh. At the office I recognize normalcy
in the God who walks through our hallways of anger,
it makes me want to leave it all behind like Iowa
after the caucus, yes, but then it’s Tuesday,
fucking Tuesday, a chair in a truck splashing into a lake
in the middle of whack. But they can all come back and mean
something together unlike the logical palindrome “no more
limitations.” The window was so clean I wanted to lick it.
√
That which hasn’t moved is finally moving, the coffee
spills into a snowbank and sizzles down to frozen grass.
Expand. Extend. Am I the star of this movie? I’m always deferring
to coffee and its sense of urgency, I didn’t have arms so I hugged
with my legs, I wanted this to be over before I could walk.
Love, broken floorboards tearing down into absence
sunk below our celebration, it’s never been easily

in my shirt pocket and still insists on showing me arms
unproud and desperate. You, scattered messages on the desk
in a trumpet of shadows, I only ask that you find something
green and solid to put across my neck in advance of the day’s
bright lines and knots. Even if history remembers today as the one
when the internet began to seem quaint, we’ll still be without a way
to understand meatloaf, which I like to eat with a side
of vague embarrassment. Everything turns into liking.
√
Sometimes when I’m only a sense of myself, I answer the phone
and just breathe. Hey whoever this is a great time to talk
I’m just on my way to where. The soul coagulates behind the eyes
and I think not of unification or its implied division
or other usages of the self in its dissolution to the market,
a correspondent to what I hope is only a small nubbin
of our looks from one to another. It’s looking from one
to all that corrupts our delineation from air. Green countertop
with ashtray, resignation to arbitrary breakfast,
and suddenly the knowledge that no one can stop me.
I wasn’t scared or upset, incredible, not asked to be good
or bad or even helpful, I went on smiling my dumb-butt grin
cracking grace across my legs. I could stand on anything,
religion, a little baby, a sense of limitations, I don’t believe
in this. The window on the floor and the absence.
Waterlillies, waterlillies, waterlillies.

√
Abstraction is an attempt to remove the assignable,
but so are most hangovers. If ever you’re bored
don’t come talk to me, meaning is always happening,
if you don’t believe it it’s over, it’ll be Tuesday now
and forever, Ack! Lonely but for the cars and colors,
generous doorway growing light in the morning,
I know everything, I know everything,
the day’s welcoming empire of moments inside me,
losing my way inside it, the bottle in my chest
filling, I still believe in hearing this on top
of me and isn’t leaving you can’t, an empty shirt
flopping down the street, I saw the colors
bounce into your face and that wasn’t enough I know I know,
there are other colors to which this spectacle lends depth and clarity,
those that fill your pants with unexpected heat and those that pound
a fist into your skull for trying and those without hair getting restless
under a climate of disinterest and those your own body couldn’t be rid of
and those you wrapped around with squelching normalcy just to leave
terrible messages that only say hello I’m not any of them
and not enough. The day is all this dumbfuck intensity and I
am swallowing my own spit, light rushes over my head,
into me, becomes something of myself I don’t even own.
Trees filling themselves with flowers, a parked car,
normalcy deepening in the afternoon.

√
With all of the weirdness he brings to this life,
James Tate has called John Ashbery the people’s poet,
as if the people were the poet’s poem, and I guess
sometimes they are. Winter air turned calmer awaiting him.
The idea of his body grew as the faces around him changed in their drift
from the norm. They came to him like cars into a tunnel
and claimed nothing more than the air they cut through.
When they were gone, he was left with a sense of drift
that overwhelms and replaces the faces that gave it rise.
How was he never frantic explaining it?
His was an implication divorced from its originating content,
present only to be felt without designation.
You can’t see their mouths speak of these things.
You can’t thread through their eyes and pray. You’ll fray.

Look here, feet
you know how it is
The intention
rusts through
and leaves
tension
the grab-bag of celebrity
and a distant impulse
to have mattered
It doesn’t matter
if the words
upon the page
before were
“EPIC MUTANT”
(and they were)
No ladies from space
are bringing
me
their special love
the one
they paid disco
Michael Bolton
to keep
It’s a gay world
a gay, gay world
a gay, gay, gay world
and I want to be
president