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01-31-2018
Peter Gizzi
Strangeness Becomes You
The old language is
the old language.
It don't mean shit.
It's not where you begin
it's how you finish.
Everyone's got beer muscles
when they're young.
Try as you must.
Break as you will.
Solo in space
clinging to space.
Fuck, the air said
passing a corner,
a long ropy snot
hitting a gutter.
To know something
and fail.
Why discount it?
The onslaught of eyes
beneath a fuck-you sky.
The syntax breaks down
its mangled draft and says,
one day the poor
will have nothing
to eat but the rich.
I hate that, when syntax
connects me to the rich.
When Orbital Proximity Feels Creepy
Right now there are teenage microwaves
screaming through your body
while you are having text with me.
This is the moment I'll need you to sing
with me.
I am making my way in some darkroom
looking for other structures to love.
From the left something speaking
I can't identify.
The floor goes unfixed and moving
and this doesn't happen only at night
but during the day when I don't want
to think on it.
That I saw a blood-orange ball caught
out my window.
That I'm listening to light and it said time.
I'm listening to time, it says, ha.
You need to be howling at bloody torn space.
Need to be spooked out of your hidey-hole
and its glowing mess.
But I love this ball I'm riding on.
The strange hunk of metal and rock whizzing
around my loves and my loving.
The fact I spin and it spins and everything
is spinning close up.
From far away it's so cool.
I guess they call this physics or they call it laws.
If they're so well-made, why do we suffer?
I thought the day was opening
but now I see it's already gone.
Outside the cruel dove has a broken window.
The day isn't friendly.
Who are you to me?
A way to understand the floor?
The floor that holds me up and leaves me
standing.
I don't know where to go.
Me, Tuesday at 5pm.
What does it mean to be in a room,
any room.
The wind banging against the clapboard.
I know enough to see the cracked pane
isn't going to be fixed anytime soon.
Who has time for such things in the song?
Breaking. Blooming.
The wobble of light on wood-grain late
in the day.
In the loneliness of orange.
In the loveliness of orange.
"the winter sun says fight"
The winter sun says fight.
The arctic blasts say fight.
This polar world is flat
even if my head
says round. Like this
meant something
to me, like nothing.
I was more ing
these days to
every surface. So
what's in this morning
that will solace?
Once I saw the city
of God reflected
in a freak shadow
the sun cast. I
thought life complete,
tight, happiness.
Now sun says cigarette,
and I abide. I remember
its noisy ray clanging
my room on my knees
looking for crumbs.
I remember days and
nights and days and
nights, days, nights,
high and dirty.
Now fog says coffee,
that'll bring you back.
To where? Where
do I actually live so far
outside my head deep
inside the chemical
wash of my genes.
I am fighting for love
but I need a new god.
Left here, this one
no longer fits. I, sick
of the reptile in me,
the dis in time,
its twigged agony.
I've been here before.
-from Archeophonics, selected by Guest Editor Ocean Vuong
BIO: PETER GIZZI is the author of Archeophonics (Wesleyan, 2016), In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems 1987-2011 (Wesleyan, 2014), Threshold Songs (Wesleyan, 2011), The Outernationale (Wesleyan, 2007), Some Values of Landscape and Weather(Wesleyan, 2003), Artificial Heart (Burning Deck, 1998), and Periplum (Avec Books, 1992). He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books.
PROMPT: Using Peter Gizzi's "the winter sun says fight" as inspiration, start a poem off with some anthropomorphizing: let the non-human boss you around a little. Instead of the winter sun, your poem could have a bossy tiger or a nagging electrical outlet. Whatever it is, have this inanimate object tell you what to do and see what happens when you let something else take the reins. -Amie Whittemore, Associate Editor, PoemoftheWeek.org
