FOUR POEMS BY GRAHAM FOUST
1984
Look at the sky, go
back inside. Cocaine
makes its way to Wisconsin.
The TV’s thick with burial, hilarious
with seed, and while the moon,
my mind, and the real world stay home,
I will walk walk
walk unkilled around
a new year’s clumsy gallows.
Anything’s impossible. I’m not
you. Here’s to music
to be in the movies to.
Iowa City
Compelled to pretend, I get
all elderly. As in beer was a quarter
and everyone would dance.
That boy is cutting buttons from
his jacket, sad miracle–that girl,
that one there, is collapsing a bird.
Graveyard. Graveyard.
Graveyard. Groceries.
I’m the only one on this bus.
To My Student Loans
A stanza, a stanza.
A room, a room, a room.
Suddenly unemployed
I wonder:
how much per sway
is the wind worth today
in these trees?
I know and will know
that there is only
ever money.
Birds are money.
Trees are money.
There are only ever breaks
in its remaining.
All the fish look shitty
on their ice today,
the fruit like a dull
pile of metal.
A dead bag commutes
between the street
and the trees.
The sky goes
every way.
I never find you.
* all poems from Necessary Stranger, Flood Editions, 2007.
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