NEW ONES
A Poem. "I have some new ones if anyone is interested."
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I have some new ones if anyone is interested.
I’d hope editors and head-scratching professors
would appreciate how they’re—rusty, welded open,
janky and blistered, like the roadhouse preacher
with one black eye. I would hope beard-stroking
prigs and tittering jackaloons would dig into them
and drink deeply of their mud, their smooth clay-rich
sedimentary mentality, generally unsanitary,
and I’d hope weird widows would whip thru
this book frenzied for answers and, finding none,
remain alone in the midsummer sun clawing
at the pages like summer beasts hungry for some
mythic poetry feast, and I would hope the young
with long wild hair would also be there, gulping
lava from this flume, this wack book whose
pastors have left for predictable geologies, but
whose abysmal monks and cloaked teachers
still sit cross-legged in the midst of its inferno
cornucopiologies seeking heaven’s gate
refusing to eat until they find at least MIND
in the midst of Belz’s sauna songs, whose naked
bicyclists ride all night, whose art buyers
wear t-shirts to the clubs, whose craven lunatic
journalists eat banjoes till they’re blue
in the groin, but we hear music wafting up
from there, and they in their wheaty hair,
their implacable freedom, would review
the thin blue plume of smoke rising from this
book’s stack as something worth citing
if not in other books in one another’s forlorn
looks as they plummet headlong into Sheol’s
latest dance craze, into money’s fake pit,
and into failed politics, and find joy there, joy
in the morning, joy in the morning. Joy, joy.
Aaron Belz is the founder of Observable Readings in St. Louis. His poetry has appeared in Fence, Fine Madness, Exquisite Corpse, The Atlantic, Painted Bride, Nimrod and many other places, and he’s published four books, including Glitter Bomb (Persea, 2014) and Soft Launch (2019). He has a New and Selected in the works. Find out more at http://belz.net
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