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.