FLOTATION DEVICE / Bill Rasmovicz
when I say body I mean buoy.
By clouds, the television taste of saffron infused lobster mousse,
pop stars lonely as fuck in the milky penthouse haze of their
elevator-only access upside-down oubliettes.
That real, yes.
Real as consequence.
Real as real consternation is a conflagration of the senses,
beyond attrition and algorithm.
Late fall, November feels full of ghosts.
I keep thinking about this girl: it’s summer and she gets stung
by a bee
and her throat flowers up into a kind of meat geranium.
I don’t know why.
That guy who lost his taste buds though, lucky.
The guy who thought his reflexes were faster than the animal trap,
not so much.
It’s unclear, should we stuff oranges in the enemy’s muffler,
or just run?
Is the orange supposed to remind us of a good-willing sun while
the wind’s always imported from somewhere else,
its oxygen fundament and still rusting us?
And I’m not much for sunsets all nostalgic and sad, but the dawn
never ceases to amaze.
Then the day progresses into talk of brown-outs, boil-overs and kids
Wailing that they have to leave the playground
and I wonder how we’ll appear afterwards,
recovered under the risen sea with the brick horse stable
spliced in the stainless steel condominium,
our mesh running shoes bait
dangling from the telephone wire.
Leverage, it turns out, is not moving the planets with a long-enough
apparatus, it’s converting your risk into my reward.
Bottom line: we’re all taxidermy eventually,
that now would’ve been the time to make a bunker out of
the grand piano, at least paint the architrave a buttery
hue to offset the Benedictine coolness
of all the grey and blue
as thusly we continue, a mind a matter to be overcome
while matter edges onward, mind all its own.
from Barnstorm Literary Review in April, 2014
Bill’s Gross Ardor is available from 42 Miles Press.
