Jay - JAY SIZEMORE

The day the poetry died

Ask the fire

The day Don Rickles died we went to war.
A dark sky streaked with red smoke
like bloody tears leaking sideways from stars,
signal flares just messages in broken bottles
dropped out the portholes of sinking ships.
No one was laughing.

Where was Kendall Jenner?
Not placing a Pepsi in the limp hand
of every dead parent of every dead child.
Not turning her cunt into a refuge
for orphans or smearing her lipstick
on the phallic ends of Tomahawks
meant to distract the world from treason.

Kendall Jenner was irrelevant again,
in less than a day of Twitter shame,
a soft drink could be a soft drink again,
and an erection could be an erection.
This is why April is the cruelest.

There’s a black hole beneath every bullet-
proof vest. And no one changed their profile pic
to the Syrian flag, except the poet
everyone had already decided to ignore.

60 is an even number, suggesting
a fair and balanced approach to death.
Just ask the fire.
It burns in the windows of churches
and terrorist cells the same,
a hell we keep choosing to make
instead of offering to take shelter
inside a glass of water.

For Okla Elliott

Elegy for the poems lost
~for Okla Elliott

I did not know you and I never will.
Why must breath whittle itself
from the bark of broken dreams
into a quiet fist, holding nothing?

Is this what it means to be tiny,
temporary as a ribbon of light
fluttering across the water?
In the fiber optic ether, they whisper

untruths and vindications,
a eulogy for unfinished works
and the cruel, callous benevolence
of a universe robbing the night,

silencing heartbeats, silencing songs,
drumbeats, the metrical enunciations
of tongues flicking against teeth,
a guitar pick placed perfectly

through three stings in the neck
of a guitar never to be played again,
its cherry-scented case unlatched
at auction, and then museum,

beneath glass and filtered light,
they’ll come from miles
to wonder at the source of magic
and words like timpani behind their eyes,

it’s the common music of lustful love,
threaded and stitched
through every palm, every throat
crying to be heard and held,

held until morning
removes all misconception
about permanence of the dark,
something the insomniacs will never learn.

Inaugural poem for Donald J. Trump

For the America that could have been
~inaugural poem for Donald J. Trump

When I piss in the shower,
I piss for America,
for a world without water
and a body nearly too tired to stand.

Somewhere an entire city boils,
spooning their showers
from a hissing toilet tank.

When I jerk off at work,
I jerk off for America,
watching my semen like hot snot
slide its way into the mouth
of a white porcelain sink.

This is true happiness,
job security like a throbbing hard-on
begging to be stroked
while the homeless shoplift
bottles of mouthwash
to chug themselves into the hospital.

I order my cheeseburger medium well.
I order my cheeseburger for America,
an America of FDA-approved cancer,
and reality TV politicians,
movie star presidents,
where you can add “gate” to the end of anything.

I welcome my labored breath,
the coming numbness
of hemispherical lightning,
being fed through a tube.

I welcome the odor of the hoarders
and their living room of pungent chaotic comforts
that will become my life of isolationism
and hermit crab-like skittishness.

I will become a nicotine patch.
I will become my favorite NFL logo.
I will become the half-eaten doughnut
left in the box at the AA meeting.
I will become the opposite of content,
wrapped in a trauma blanket,
rustling like a pile of leaves
with something hidden underneath.

America, when I shriek, I shriek for thee.

Remembering Leonard Cohen

Darker
~for Leonard Cohen

You want it darker, let the volcanoes erupt,
darkness is what happens when the stars turn up.
Darkness is what happens when your breath gives up.
America, I write your name
in the fog on the glass,
and watch it turn to tears.

Treaty with the Devil and your food tastes like smoke,
there’s Jesus snapping his fingers
waiting for the punchline in the joke,
but I never said I was funny,
and it’s dangerous to assume things
from people you don’t know.

On the level, I’m not lying when I say it’s bad.
On the level, someone stole what little dignity we had.
Before things get worse, they have to get bad.
Let’s not pretend we’re in control anymore.

Leaving the table with my food still warm,
my stomach has turned
itself into a cigarette burn,
a wound inside me
becoming an invisible scar,
for the rest of my life
I’ll eat nothing but paper.

If I didn’t have your love,
I’d be counting the days
between my mouth
and the barrel of a gun.
I’ve never given Death a kiss,
but soon I’ll suck him off.

Traveling light hits us from every side,
children still ask
for the door to be cracked,
and I’ll always concede
to my child’s palliative panic attacks.

It seemed the better way,
to turn each heart into a fire of protest,
to shoot bottle rockets
into each other’s eyes,
and still hope to catch
the falling sparks from the fuses.

Steer your way clear of the cliff
if you can,
but I’m afraid
half the world is gone
like the moth in your dream
you woke trying to catch.

String reprise / treaty while it’s good
and it’s there for you to sign,
soon enough all that’s left of this life
will be the ash
of the poetry we burned.

cohen

An Almost-Prize-Winner available online now

The winners and finalists for the Nancy D. Hargrove Editor’s Prize are available to read now at Jabberwock Review’s website. They have been made available as a preface to the print issue releasing next month. Please make your way over and check out the great work from the writers. My poem “How to know if God exists” is a finalist, a piece that relates poignantly to the anniversary of September 11th, 2001. Please check it out and let me know what you think. And congratulations to the winners and other finalist, whose poems are all excellent.

coversum16

A poem about the end of the world

I wanted to protect you

I wanted to protect you from death
and so I lied
about the boy in the casket
who was anything but sleeping.
I wanted to protect you from violence
and so I bought a gun
to keep beneath my mattress.

To protect you from heartache
I said your Yorkie ran away
after I washed the dirt
from his grave down the drain.
To protect you from adulthood
I hid your gifts in the attic
until Christmas morning,
and took a million photos
of your joyful face
to keep you the same age.

I wanted to protect you from the elements,
the heat, the cold, the rain,
and so, come summer, our AC would run nonstop,
while the winter would fill our lungs with woodsmoke
and my hands with the callused work of cutting.

I wanted to protect you from apathy,
so I nurtured your every whim,
speaking with invisible friends,
naming the grasshoppers you caught in the lawn,
hanging your crude drawings of houses
under magnets on the fridge.

I wanted to protect you from disease,
and so you’re now afraid of needles,
despite my promises of ice cream.
I wanted to protect you from fear
so I said, “Of course, monsters aren’t real.”

I wanted you to be safe,
to know love like a blanket
fresh from the wash,
to know each living thing
as a tooth on a cog, amid the wheels
and gears of a grand machine we’ll never see.

But I was wrong
to try and protect you from this world,
to think you’d never know the itch
and swell of its sting,
something as simple as flesh
serving the purpose of food
for the microcosm beneath.

Elegy for Gene Wilder on the day of his death

For Gene

Say goodbye to childhood,
Goodbye imagination.
Say goodbye to whimsy
Goodbye, gold ticket sun.

Purple velvet, curly cue grin
mania embodied wide blue eyes
shining like wet silk,
Jack without his candle stick.

Technicolor or black and white,
scenes spilled over with vibrant life,
a dance, a soliloquy, a turn of the cheek,
laughter rushing forward like flooded creek.

Want to change the world?
It’s as easy as lighting a fuse
or a lantern in an unlit room,
as easy as closing your eyes
to the hammers of doom.

For Gilda, for the faces awash in light,
for the ether that swims betwixt our lives,
for the river of silver streaked bone dust chimes
filling our veins with ticking time.

For the children, for the never born,
for the geezers struggling to hold their form,
for the quiet, for the obscene, the uncertain
and the lost, for the dreamers dreaming again.

Say goodbye to childhood,
Goodbye imagination.
Say goodbye to whimsy,
Goodbye gold ticket sun.

gene

New publishing news

I had some work appear this month at the online journal In Between Hangovers. They published three of my poems, which can be found online now in their archives. I also have two poems forthcoming from their sister publication, Your One Phone Call. Many thanks to the staff for sharing some of my work.

In my other endeavor, the new Murder of Crow Hollow 19 released this month on the 19th. It features stunning work from eleven talented poets. Please take a moment to read through the issue,and if anything moves you,feel free to let the artist know about it.Everyone could use a little more encouragement in their lives.

A poem about grief

The last elegy

What can my words do?
Not bring men back to life.
Not make rose petals
fly from the mouths of barrels.
Not erase the myriad ripples
of time’s relentless consequence.

Love and beauty still exist
though it gets harder to see
through the haze of fear.
I’m privileged to suggest
that the world moves
regardless of man,
that self-preservation is trivial
in a cosmos of unknowns.

When you feel helpless
look to the stars
and remember how dark
the night is with eyes closed.
When you feel helpless
put your cheek to the ground
and breathe deep the absence
of murder and malice,
the earthly scents of soil and stone.

We all die alone.
What are we doing in the in between?
I want to believe
that people are good,
that these deaths matter
to everything that comes after.
I want to believe
that blood spilled in the streets
comes at a cost
never truly paid.

These lines drawn between us
disappear when viewed from space,
just as we disappear,
and only the lights in our makings
can be seen like distant suns
and the hope that light
is what we all eventually become.

Poem for Muhammad Ali

The Greatest

Poetic pugilist,
writing poems
on opponents’ faces
of paper and papyrus,
with fists, clenched and padded
and wrapped in leather
like notebooks packing punches.

Float like a butterfly,
sting like a bee,
hands can’t hit
what the eyes can’t see.

War is something more
than a photo opportunity
for Elvis Presley
in his G. I. Blues.
Something about killing
strangers that never uttered
a racial slur, never hated
or enslaved men
with different color skin,
wasn’t worth keeping
that championship belt,
was worth being called coward,
worth taking a stand.

Float like a butterfly,
sting like a bee,
hands can’t hit
what the eyes can’t see.

And Parkinson’s became that
invisible enemy
a brain disease to battle
futilely and eternally
as emotions lose their nuance
to a blank face,
dressed in the flesh
of the greatest boxer
who ever lived,
the dog that made thunder afraid,
thief of Superman’s cape,
only man to ever make Godzilla cry
one hand tied behind his back.