Andrew Levy
VACUUM
At the present moment of world history why I have chosen
to live in a vacuum in front of a glass full of honey.
At the present moment of world history why I have chosen
to live in a vacuum in contemplation of the English language.
At the present moment of world history why I have chosen
to live in a vacuum and almost enter into a conflict with it.
At the present moment of world history why I have chosen
to live in a vacuum not with regret, but as a musical turn.
At the present moment of world history why I have chosen
to live in a vacuum in consequence of this ethic density.
At the present moment of world history why I have chosen
to live in a vacuum more pliant than the ceremony of form, of
insurgence, of the precluded notion of choice.
At the present moment of world history why I have chosen.
INVASIVE HEGEMON
Much of what has been written.
The liars do just what they please, they just please themselves.
A little more and they explode, as though that were the whole story.
Absorbed in the cluster of a greater system, a kind of centripetal
backwash that checks the rot of wah-wah.
Don’t be too hard on poets studying to be a professor. Their uniform,
horizontal writing never gives you the margarita.
Regarding the issueless predicament of existence, whose death,
we understand, has occurred, I have little or no advice. Usually, it’s
four to six days for the average pencil.
And this is
a terrible thing to have to say.
We now feed our pigs on sugarbeet pulp. It is
all the same to them.
CENOTAPH
A sleet dirigible six thousand feet above blue water in the unenviable
position of pine trees as we go into them covered in sleet and snow decoding
Mississippi independent of its occasion, very dicey, hanging tight to an epistemology
totally involved in the life of my heart, and yours. A liquid rain whose fury
is precipitated by the ecology of bones.
The full spectrum starts at midnight. It’s a prolonged event
and things will get nastier.
That’s what’s happening upstairs as well. Sunday into Monday
is going to look a whole lot different. The media literate depends on how
far north the recurrent predomination in Hell and Paradise is
a continuous purgatorial process but may be missing benefits neither
prize nor penalty. All plans include a series of stimulants
for the partially purged.
Ten water jets bubble out of the local landfill.
TOES
All I need is one-thousand dollars a day. Would you like to
invest in my apartment? Rest this side of a stroke? Dine on dialectics?
Pierce my tongue? Climb up on the ledge of a window 33 stories
above the ground? Place your hand on the end of my arm?
The moral rights of the reader have been arrested in subtle attunement
with other readers. You know, morons.
An existence open to light, to language, from the infinite sunset
will not return after arriving or attaching the digital
panopticon as cicadas boil in oil. In the situation room’s intercom system,
running aground in tandem with talks and agreements,
although fewer of them, the occasional emotion is an ascetic
entrepreneur in a finite forum.
Each of these missiles carry profiles and fat content analyzed
(sometimes camouflaged) in advance.
Andrew Levy is the author of Artifice in the Calm Damages (Chax Press), Don’t Forget to Breathe (Chax Press), Nothing Is in Here (EOAGH novella), and twelve other collections of poetry and prose. His work has appeared in numerous American and international magazines and anthologies, including Poetics-for-the-More-than-Human-World; The Canary Islands Connection – 60 Contemporary American Poets; and Resist Much, Obey Little – Inaugural Poems to The Resistance.