Everyone Gasps with Anxiety

The new aspirin is a blue-blooded Burberry model
With an Oxford classics degree, but my migraine
Flares beneath a canopy of melanoma-blurring sun
What pains me is the plain human tangle on the L.I.E.
And feeling the tricyclics fail me beneath the canopy of melanoma-blurring sun
And the long pressed-out El Greco bodies stretched
Liked colorless taffy in the studio and At the Night the States Have Ruined Me.
Steroid weight gleams off my heart like a chubby Aaron Basha jewelry foot
A poem that says “Reinvent the vomitorium!”
And At Night the States have ruined me. I can persuade him
To be alive and living in hotel rooms is dehumanizing.
Inside of this I’m passing out
From bravery, dyspepsia, the Boy with an Arab Strap
In fluttering tremolo, the way an air of tremor lives in some bordeauxs but
Like the Hamptoms rising from the pollutions mist—
Something so Anglo-Saxon refusing to die or bonnet its frailty
In layers of preservatives. Please somebody peel me dreamlessly aback
To inhabit fleshly then brittle climates like a Giacometti fever dream

Copyright © Jeni Olin, 2005. From Blue Collar Holiday. Used with permission of Hanging Loose Press.