12-2-2024
Jake Byrne
PROTECTIVE WEIRDING
The night purrs. I’m liquored
Slick with gin and camphor.
Your arm with the left-handed
swastika tattoo, scruff of my neck,
I’m groomed. Dogteeth smile.
Now who’s a good boy.
A very good boy. You say
I had no idea you were so young;
I interpret this as a compliment.
My eighteenth birthday. Your gift—
draped crystal and chain over my nape.
To protect me from all harm
done by others. I did not scan
the emphasis. I dropped my
twenty-sided die; failed fortitude
save against charisma.
In a pawn shop, eight years later,
I get the gift appraised: not crystal
at all. Set in lead and stormglass:
little ampoule of fox urine. A mark:
scentless in the cold of a crowd
unbearable musk
when an older man got me
alone in a warm room
[ASSETS NOW IN PLAY]
In cotton white briefs Bodies flagrant discomposing
Dishonorable discharges From the ER
Hospital fluorine Took too much hash and end up there
Again And the album playing on the hospital speakers
Is a little Cheesy Sounds like it’s
Going to Ibitha And we say
We say Never Again And God suggests
Nobody gets to say that Without a test of their resolve
And so we say
Ibiza is not the Carthage we did not want to burn
Ibiza is not the Rome you sought for
Ibiza and Berlin too are assets now in play
So decode secret instructions in the morse code of a catheter
Look out the window. The dead hang there
Tearless on black oaks lacquered now in rain
Dripping as my hands do Now of opaque rain…
I could speak of it only
Via negation
A story the mind tells the body
In the body’s secretions, written in
A script the mind cannot read
Does not register
In the part of the mind corresponding to language
And in this hospital there is no picture we could take
Of the space around a molecule
Vibrating in a magnetic field
To produce for us the comfort of a diagnosis
In this hospital, we discern grand and terrible truths.
It’s not all that we discern from each other
It’s not all that I want to describe
I wanted to describe the feeling of electric
Current that I regarded as the root of the word venir
To come – a hairy fleshy sort of romance
Unmediated by a screen
Was still, as of today’s writing, still possible
If only at an instant of connection
Even at this blue-black hour I find myself in
Historical materialism feels insufficient
When between the crackle of energy expressed by two bodies
Displayed on the sanitized iPad stations with which
We see off our dead
In the most noble fashion our culture affords us
HOMONATIONAL ANTHEM
-For Isabel Fall, and the victims of the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian war
Restrain also the keen fury of my heart
which provokes me to tread the ways of blood-curdling strife.
-Homeric Hymn to Ares, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White
Here the truceless armies yet
Trample rolled in blood and sweat
They kill and kill and never die
And I think that each is I
-A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad, XXVIII: The Welsh Marches
This is a poem
Composed of images
And words
Sometimes my words do not suffice
Here is a photo of Pete Buttigieg
Wearing cool guy wraparound shades
And camo fatigues
Holding a NATO M16 rifle
The sight of the rifle points down to the ground
He’s standing in front of a lot of puppies
Dozens of them, various breeds
He posted the photo to Twitter
With the caption
“Time for ‘therapy’!!!”
I remember September 11th.
And I remember the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I remember how 2003 felt.
I remember My White Liberalism™️
My White Liberalism
Was easy. It was easy to
View the world
As consisting of good guys
And bad guys. I was a good guy
So were the politicians that were Not The Bad Guys.
Because we weren’t the bad guys.
If our military killed somebody
It must have been for the right reasons.
It really is that easy
You need to be a little sick
To walk around and evaluate the world
Through this kind of projective fantasy.
But a sick citizen
is the most likely product
Of a sick nation in a sick society
Jake Byrne is an award-winning queer poet and a non-award-winning copywriter and editor. Read his work here, follow his Twitter, or sign up for his weekly Substack about perfume here. He is a settler that lives in Tkaron:to on land governed by the Dish With One Spoon Covenant.
