Poem: “Keeping Up With The Huidobros”, Audio

From my upcoming book, Professional Poetry, published by White Hole Press…

Keeping Up with the Huidobros

I was born at the age of eight on the cut 

of no Christ; gin and tonic was the equator of my 

hairless pain under the geraniums of the German 

piano, a cuddy beneath bergs. I had the blank 

stare of a victim, a relentless bicycle. I breathed 

in the next blind father upon a trapeze bar, I loved 

the daylight, the curtain of every hat. My mother spoke 

with larks coming from her mouth, she embroidered 

buttons to my breast. On the first day, 

I asked the larks to un-beak these buttons, 

to look upon the nudes of the gallery, 

to collect the broken shells of rational hearts. 

Then I created my tongue and braided my grave. 

I constructed my development from my grandmother’s 

slips and Russian soap stars upon the tombs of sublime 
retinal failure. Speeding gold chessboards of sight, 
perhaps they preferred disconnection so as not to see 

the disconnected language sculpted from this life; 
perhaps when disengaged, the last sigh of vision 

delivered untangled tropes. I looked at my fists,

angled as accordions, a horse upon each virgin 

extracted for the stain of sleep, the illusion of hair.

Where the blood of my vain tongue slipped into my 

father’s glass and burned my skin an effigy; of phone 

cords and exoplanets of bound light; each season a blister

of stone; I, a little soldier who fights. All of my

throats the planets, money wired to each wintry

renewal of skin, more skin, all the skin I could

grow. I drank the hunters, the cascades of bile,

each hammer of my selves a bitter astronomy. There

is a secret to my vertigo, it’s my gills in a sea

of handkerchiefs. I was born at the age of eight

on the cut of no Christ; gin and tonic 

was the equator of my hairless pain.

True poems are fires; its conquests

lit with shivers of pleasure or pain.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: