Flowers of Rad
I want to write a poem as long as California like lying on a couch forever as a serious man takes notes on your dreams in a little book maybe I mean I want to talk forever but is there even a difference anyway like my uncle who went walking and never stopped or that day on the LA Freeway when a horse got loose, people freaking out cars honking and skidding and me and my sister rooting for the horse who I still imagine, 20 years later trotting around the LA Freeway a living argument against time as people drive right past her without even noticing a horse she keeps on, at home in the gridlock a phenomenon in the smog we want to think she is looking for something but she is past panic now content, her heart a part of that freeway unaware that I am the one telling this story and in this version no one listens to anyone’s dreams and that couch is the one we broke off on while your parents were gone blood on the cushion which wouldn’t come out no matter what we tried so we gave up and just laid there, sweating in the bliss of thinking nothing and somewhere a startled horse is not smashed by a semi on the LA Freeway on a summer day in 1988
Copyright © 2014 by Sampson Starkweather. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on March 12, 2014. Browse the Poem-a-Day archive.
“Pop Quiz: This poem is about: a.) A horse (possibly Mr. Ed). b.) A mashup of a Jack Spicer poem which ends by never ending, an amalgamation of several Larry Levis poems in which horses and L.A. feature prominently, mixed with early Wu Tang lyrics that eerily mirrored my teen existence. c.) My uncle who walked off into the Sonoran desert...who is still walking... d.) A signed confession of the defendant in the ongoing lawsuit of Time & The State of California vs. Sampson Starkweather and His Ridiculous Little Dreams e.) A not-so-subtle product placement for couches and the uselessness of truth. f.) The way L.A. in the eighties (especially from the point-of-view of two kids from North Carolina in the backseat of their grandparent’s Lincoln Continental) was like a backdrop for a movie about L.A. in the eighties, impossibly cliché—hookers and poodles, hot pink sunsets and palm trees—an elaborate play with set design and costumes and extras all put on exclusively for those two kids in the backseat on their way up a state that never ends, past twisted manzanita where ranch-red earth meets lush impossible green in a choked and tortured air where everything seemed to be the new end of desire, where wanting was a way life lived secretly in the backseats of the world, which would be lost in the matrix of memory only to tumble out on the other side as misremembered magic.”
—Sampson Starkweather