Pomode
Joseph Mains
[for you I’d be right-handed in reverse]
What I keep calling me keeps calling back Don’t call me that.
So explain water to the fish fishy Donald. You know: my father was a salesman
but I’m going to be a sailor. We know
we can’t quite kiss yet: you are dead. You know,
You’re the one for me, Fatty, you’re the one
I really need. I forgive you for calling me a peon.
It’s the same as they always say of the 18yrold
ready-set: buy it pretty & get it dirty.
Explain colors to the blind dear Donald. Like Christmas like your birthday
like a Christmas Day birth.
Canine ate seven sick
five-year-olds. Yeah, you’re always flappin’
skin (i.e., the blossom unfolding ((0))s). I’ll gouge your heart and pump it with lead:
you’re a fucker. That’s a tautology.
Sure, my Joyce ink outs life as one oversized art installation piece,
not some orange circus po-mo bullshit, circa 1973,
but, you goddamn slick fucker, your synecdoche Gravity’s
Odeipa should mean something, should point to something undead,
but the most goddamn tricky thing happens:
it doesn’t. V2 Rocket? Dick.
Stamp collection of a lost lover? There lies a dearth
of Modernity. We can say
it now: that mysterious V plain old stands for Vagina.
Don’t worry: I’ll burn and bury the Leo DiCaprio
cutout with the cut-out mouth (brush up on yr Lacan,
vis-a-vis structural linguistics, oral, etc.) you fucked in high school. (No one
reads this po, no one will know.)
You used to write hypertext; I dosed it Ritalin now it’s plain played out.
esrever ni dednah-thgir eb d’I uoy rof. I’m right-handed;
There’s never enough of all the things you want.
Joseph Mains is an American poet living in Portland, Ore., where he co-curates the reading series Bad Blood and is a founding member of Milk/Shop.
