Dana Ward

Don’t Let Me Be Wistful

The heat out there this morning

is contained heat like things keep applicable boxes

at the ready then subsume their diverging constituent parts

long ambivalent talks into midnight, all those

glowy Sofia Coppola movies no one ever seems to know

how they feel about those. I don’t feel

how I know anymore to be more than something seeking

my appalling lack of cinematic knowledge, fictive innocence

& something like the break-down of those little boxes

little tombs put their hands up in front of my mouth

there’s a tacitly humiliating eulogy to drown out couldn’t feel

much more stupid about feeling stupid over feeling

stupid, living. Let me go & watch something

moving several images some of them symbolize humility broken

postures bloodshot eyes, intimately talking through this

publicly I am not developing at all but just the same. So hot

outside in the morning heat locking hazy jonquils

& sunflowers dead for two weeks, ridiculously

mournful as I’ll try & dimly think of the last real shock.

I remember disgust perhaps & something like alarm, the phone

going off in the middle of the night, pervasive disappointment

&, for sure, horror, but shock?, as if the heat were seceding from the frames

of its containment thought & feeling & establishing some wonderama

ratios & beanpole features quick to surge beyond the human model.

I know I do the heat out there this morning

will & maybe I should be the one I know who has to stop.

If I have to heal myself completely every time before I start

I shouldn’t be. I think about the god of demurrment in the world

or I think about it later having fallen to its love spell--the heat

keeps me shut up at the table in the morning

at the laptop arranging each letter with the same affectless love

it’s nothing moving Avery born & Vivian to come December

Kermit the Frog sings the Ave Maria while the white flag is endlessly

lowered & raised through the whole master/slave dialectic forever.

Don’t let me be wistful. Let me be the actual heat, forgiven

its severity & leaving for the year. Mercy is just like the children’s zoo it’s real

weird to think about anything now, think how fucking hard

a fucking beach read used to be sewn into its spine

delicious words from start to finish I could just

lay there & die it’s so goddamn nice in this sigh vitrine real 9/11

kind of morning Friday morning, lamely shifting in my chair, the fan

that stops the love that moves the world that stops goes out on gold

weeks other weeks it just sits in the back.

It collects statically. I hate that.

     
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