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​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.

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