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 (#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.
GIANT EXCERPT: from The Dance of No Hard Feelings by Mark Bibbins (#1)
Arriving In Your New Country
Wrong decisions are harder to make than most
people realize, tears flying sideways in a gale.
We swerve in the road so as not to hit dead things,
but I used to know someone who did the opposite.
He liked to drive through them. Stars are most
serious when seen from the back of a pickup truck
while very very drunk, and if someone kisses you
there it doesn’t count. I would grab your sadness
as a movie monster would, bring it to the harshest
part of the mountain: I haven’t seen this place yet
but I am told weeping is not part of its economy
and everything there is delicious if eaten alone.
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. Check back daily for fresh doses.