You Make the Culture

Amy King

The words became librarians, custodians of people
I looked for on the bridge.
I forgot my own face.
I read the book backwards, and
I painted your name in lace
(I drink only the milk of script as beer).
I dislocate all gallery aesthetics,
I carry keys for Baltimore and
Go where no one is my name.
I wish I could sculpt a healing street
from a blanket of guns. The way the sun drops
behind a one-armed cop & we default
to believing in voices. This is the trough of sleep
we draw from. Even gravity works at night.
If I pull your speech on the carpet of impossibility,
will you speak this immediate need for movement?
The immediate need of not drowning in public?
I will walk with the sharks of our pigments
if that's what inconclusive data requires,
until we leave rooms that hold us apart.
What you see as a small minority, I see
as closer to liberatory. Nothing comes from the center
that doesn't break most everything in parts.
I break bread with the handwriting of words.
Nothing of appearance is always an illusion.
Lend me your book when you finish
writing it. I’ll be the first to fill in its spaces.

A tiny face of genius & tolerance brands itself organic abrupt vampire of himself, of health, stoned circle of having risen— Why the natural inclination to pet, to be affection with a soul made of bone on haunches among honeysuckle and little else to dine upon? I wasn't able to claim the backs of my legs, and for that crime, was martyred for modern day races. From these trials, I learned to be true to truths that hugged and lost and slew. Not what makes my liver stand on end but how to shake fists against the failings of insects, of lambs, of castles and the fruits of shadows that walk with us behind our backs, swampy corners of decay united. From old Jewish towns we embrace the plotted demise and welcome a ghost in born-again tatters, being all that we know and the only face that matters. Except a child from the lawn who watches, in stone. We become as ripe as an earth's waiting meat, better for sculpting to crumble a rib-eyed dust spelling death out, names that soften at moon, broken to rise again.

Man acts as an antenna for the sun and then: a trout in the milk, men who wear kilts after darkness. Build a bottle of fish with a few dried figs. Dear Shadow, when did I become that person? I mean one who says "plastic glucose" without wondering what rotten-sweet is? The one who teenagers represent? There's a room in your breath I crawl into, eating the wallpaper's yellow, looking out for the man on the stairs, his knife in hand, poise incarnate. I am your minimum envelope, your string between tin cans and cannot stop the talk between us. In Berlin, they lay buildings on concrete slabs that look straight back at us. The windows of the soul seek to err on the side of humanity. Put a piece of glass between us for less resistance. Invite rococo scrawl in heated breath upon it. The moon appears in a cinched waist. Stand penance atop her curvature's axis, above a hill where headstones claw up through the clouds, pulling their fibers into blankets across us. The sleet and silver smiles loom, gauze-thin. We slip from a reel of translation back into how we cater to loneliness, how we move our mouths and mouth our meals, engorging entrails where even foodstuffs give off energies. I am that uncontrollable, fear in a mesh of moonrock's lapis soup. We demons are in love and afoot. As in the primordial diary, time will come to take the hem in, tether the ether that dreams become from, and examine our ankles as the sugar washes over, disappearing. As with everything, that's the body he works on. She also knows honey lasts best in the future.

Poems

You Make the Culture

More by Amy King

The Marble Faun

The Moon in Your Breath

Ancient Sunlight

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Poems

You Make the Culture

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