fuck fuck fuck! this poem is dedicated to all poems lost to power outages: may your ghost words find rest.
always come at long last
the sky tastes like clean skin
and i open my mouth to take it all
something like the perfect peach sublimated
leaving nothing but this rolling on the tongue
rolling in.
And the pressure is so great
i am expanding -
full of spores -
the onslaught begins.
Hailstones like golfballs
frogs
baseballs
ham sandwiches
eyes
fingertips
pounding.
The mythic storm that this brings to mind
left dents all over the city
i never saw.
I like this
the density brings out minute clarities
tiny beautiful grey impacts by the hundreds
at the stop light
in an inconsequential puddle
at a trivial curb
for free.
i testify.
i will bear witness.
i will bear witness for you,
Enfield, CT,
skater kid soaking wet
sprawl town with rotting roots
in an ungraceful adolescence
tumbled and run over and paved, shopping malled and fucked over.
The tornado warnings suit you
and your nascent industrial parks.
This storm is opaque,
you are lustrous, clad in
"beautified" median strips, traffic islands.
This heaviness is liberating. Suddenly the quotidian
is strangely light
The sky doesn't know what to do
it is clotted and split
I think there is a fight going on
somewhere
or i am being sedated.
hard and slow.
I can only watch. There's nothing i can add. This needs no cues. What strange clouds over there.
You wanna lesson? Nothing lasts.
Bet you don't want a lesson any more.
The clouds are clearing out now,
two hopping grey fleas that way,
an upended vase of nimbulous cumulatory fleurs du mal
spewing over - what? - Holyoke?
Ghoultails slithering away over mountain spines
things emptying themselves out
small drifts of spent ice bullets
under windows and
resting
by the mounded flowers' beds.