GIANT Excerpt: from The Dance of No Hard Feelings by Mark Bibbins (#5)
Suicides of the ’90s,
you don’t need me to tell you we needed you and you were not nothing to us. Mimicking into stupor was a better guess at how to play ourselves–even I was on TV so I shouldn’t have to recount that either. We tried to say heathen but our mouths ended up spouting a music better suited to driving through a star-tarted desert. Creepy cowboy got an era, crossword lothario got years, but we do we call this shit? Might makes maybe, to put it mildly. Branches of science we haven’t invented or gotten around to suppressing would alter the hideous tides, keep us from killing what keeps us alive. The whole world, to the extent that we can name such an invention, we have sliced open–I never did make it to physics class but with luck it’s not too late, the last so slow to leave so leave on all the light.
you don’t need me to tell you we needed you and you were not nothing to us. Mimicking into stupor was a better guess at how to play ourselves–even I was on TV so I shouldn’t have to recount that either. We tried to say heathen but our mouths ended up spouting a music better suited to driving through a star-tarted desert. Creepy cowboy got an era, crossword lothario got years, but we do we call this shit? Might makes maybe, to put it mildly. Branches of science we haven’t invented or gotten around to suppressing would alter the hideous tides, keep us from killing what keeps us alive. The whole world, to the extent that we can name such an invention, we have sliced open–I never did make it to physics class but with luck it’s not too late, the last so slow to leave so leave on all the light.
All this week, HTMLGiant posted poems from The Dance of No Hard Feelings (Copper Canyon) Mark Bibbins’s eagerly and long-awaited followup collection to 2003’s Sky Lounge. Day #1 is here. Day #2 is here. Day #3 is here. Day #4 is here.
GIANT Excerpt: from The Dance of No Hard Feelings by Mark Bibbins (#4)
We are not kissing and the river
tricks the boat. Even at night,
colors freeze when they would
rather bleed. He likes delay,
He says, the long ascent to sex.
[first his finger to his lips]
He of the somewhere-wadded-up
mainsail, half hard and too tired
[to the knuckle now] to try–
when in doubt he demurs
then dissolves, spooked
as I and twice as strange.
The glass we handed back
and forth sits on the sill:
mouth- and fingerprints
overlap, more reasonable
as a form of mimesis [out now
and glistening] than simple
trajectory–and what about
the bridge, under which
the boat [back in, slowly,
slowly] has slipped, its
chain of lights, distorted
by the edge of the glass,
just now turned out?
All this week, HTMLGiant will be posting poems from The Dance of No Hard Feelings (Copper Canyon) Mark Bibbins’s eagerly and long-awaited followup collection to 2003’s Sky Lounge. Day #1 is here. Day #2 is here. Day #3 is here. Check back daily for fresh doses.
GIANT EXCERPT: from The Dance of No Hard Feelings by Mark Bibbins (#2)
I Used to Have the Shampoo
with D.A. Powell
with D.A. Powell
I used to have the shampoo
by the balls but the wind hurt my hair so.
I can’t get over that retarded girl on the trike,
can’t find the apes in the apiary
can’t get hard for the hardtack
and the cannery is closed.
Well, this is just a trumped-up way of saying
your haircut is among the finest in Wyoming.
From the brightly arranged parlors of San Francisco
to the uncompromising river, beside which, huskily, we sang,
you can modify an adverb with an adverb–they do it all the time in France–
but I have not left my room in thirty years.
My life is shrinking like a desiccated organ,
wilted japonicas drenched in wine.
All this week, HTMLGiant will be posting poems from The Dance of No Hard Feelings (Copper Canyon) Mark Bibbins’s eagerly and long-awaited followup collection to 2003’s Sky Lounge. Day #1 is here. Check back daily for fresh doses.