Three Poems from Everyone Gets Out of this Alive
William James :: Everywhere, everywhere I turn, hyperbole (and isn’t it literally the worst?) Us mortals so afraid of our own simple magnificence we escalate, raise the stakes, fling flang flung up even higher as if fireflies aren’t entire constellations just by breathing, as if grandiosity & bombast are the only promise we have of talking to God. Sweet Jesus, I am tired of the clamor & the scrawl, the bloated simile. I’m poeming my own private protest, my own resistance against alchemy. I won’t day azure when I mean cerulean, won’t say nickelodeon when I mean penny slot race car. I won’t say hyacinth or anemone or chrysanthemum because dandelions grow in such abundance around my folks’ backyard and how could I deny them a poem of their own? The sunbauble starbursts I hold beneath my chin until my throat glows with the soft sweet butter of summertime, or watch the deer in the garden nibble softly until they dart away in a flash of timid white. What I mean is that all these simplicities are so achingly gorgeous. Such striking monuments to how small I feel all the time. I mean this transmogrification of the mundane is exhausting. I mean I only wrote that the curtains were blue because they were. :: A gray squirrel dances on a telephone wire, a flock of sparrows tornadoes south. No apples in the orchard thanks to drought, so the deer have been nibbling at dry leaves. Drought today, flood tomorrow, everything balances out. Everything in its right place. Here’s a window- less room, where we can imagine cold gray lifeless New England skies, the clouds all gunpowder & rock salt black & white & gray & black & white & gray. Today someone blasted the sunset with buckshot. Today the sky exploded into a murder of inky crows. This is how the old timers tell you a storm is comin’ – better board up the house. Tape off the windows with an X. Bring the dog to the root cellar, stock up on bottles of water & cans of beans. The wind won’t quit so let’s all hold hands & watch this coal-dusted train-wreck sky peel away like sunburnt skin. All this strange weather in the air. All this poison in the well. Let’s all kiss someone on the face while the water rises. Let’s all make love underneath the storm. :: We can give it whatever name we want, but a river is still a river, is still dark water rushing everything away. We can call it wildflower, or pitchfork, or one billion points of light, but still, if I fill my pockets with lead & stroll careless in the current, I will drown. Reality has no appreciation for poetics. If I say this thing is not a thing, it is still that thing despite my protests otherwise. The sun is still an unfathomably large, gaseous round inferno even if we call it copper. The moon is still just the moon, even if we call it mother or apiary or stumbledust pock-marked heart. I don't mean to be curmudgeonly, but it's the truth. Language sets us free until we give it power. Rothko painted simple squares & made them beautiful, & if swatches of pigment in the most ordinary shapes can be gorgeous without the need for ornamentation, why can't we? We can throw dollar coins into city fountains & call it offering instead of magic. We can pull out all of our teeth with knives & hammers, & spit out blood. No need to call it sanguine. No need to call it anything but red. |
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About the Author:
William James is a poet, aging punk, and train enthusiast from Manchester, NH. He's the author of rebel hearts & restless ghosts (Timber Mouse Publishing) and the founding editor of Beech Street Review. His work has been published in literary journals, punk zines, and the occasional vinyl LP. You can find him online on Twitter (@thebilljim) or here.
William James is a poet, aging punk, and train enthusiast from Manchester, NH. He's the author of rebel hearts & restless ghosts (Timber Mouse Publishing) and the founding editor of Beech Street Review. His work has been published in literary journals, punk zines, and the occasional vinyl LP. You can find him online on Twitter (@thebilljim) or here.