Explore Poems: Boredom

The Last Lesson
When will the bell ring, and end this weariness?
How long have they tugged the leash…

The onion man at the farmer’s market
rants to me about preventative medicine.
I’m his captive audience…

We were so poor.
The air was a quiver
of thoughts we drew from

to poise, unsaid
in the ineffable
world we lived in.

Sun, scarcely a penny
in that dreary setting,
every night gave up

to a smog-strewn avalanche
of searchlights, crossing
the heavens, a bicker

to buy a new used...

The cardiac bang bang of literary fame and the bruising after,
you bang bang bang, I bruise for no reason at all.

A good guy, perched on the excavator, extends its metal arms
and the moment of exposure, of shame

condensed into a twinkling,...

Once a flâneur— though no longer nimble or lively
but still eager—always a flâneur—

On the rue de la Femme-sans-Tête
a large room illuminated only at one end—

Serenity impeding density amends recollection—

Once knew–in preference to yet to know, have yet to say—

Extricate and...

The 18th century bawd who sells her daughter’s virginity
to an Earl. The tired CIA operative who says, “just do it,”
then half a village dies. The plantation owner’s wife.
The lonely CEO of the pharmaceutical company
who screams like a banshee when an...

Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse of boats:
boats of prisoners, boats cracking under sky-iron, boats making corpses
bloom like algae on the shore. Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse
of the bombed mosque. There was the apocalypse of the taxi...

To have arrived here, weighed down with fistfuls
of calendar entries, unsuitably
boggle-eyed as if new—
so these are mountains,
there is horror, which is the subway line
where I may lay down my creed
and when will my breath stop
acidulating like this?
Exceed, said 27. In...

You pick me up late
a viscous outflow

from the volcanic ledge
of my thinking.

Me in my duplex-hunger,
in my firestorm-astonished

dress, the pattern of crisp asphalt,
the pattern, simple condensed

nuclei, against my dry
lightning ache. You pick me up late

and we drive through
polyhedronated structures

of sound and...

every night
an ancient priest
gives me advice
and in the morning
I’m all alone
with nothing
a universe
I don’t want
to bother you
or to upend
the universe
but your realtors
are getting
a divorce

the dark
is the dark
the wind
the sound
of the ocean
all relative
to the sensitivity
of a tiny
chain of bones
leading up
to or...

the city not yet shielded in ice     the harbor not yet
frozen enough     to walk across     trees without leaves
prismatic    the thing no one

thought would happen     happened     in a vast hall
I...

Neighbor, your mower
cast dust over the edge
where the field meets
the field, toy-sized ring-
necked snakes halved
and flattened by blades
among blades, and now
our things are mingled.
What do you covet
that is mine? Chigger-
riddled passion
blooms, a glint
of beetles loitering
under their anther eaves,
a car idling...

Have psalter and breviary. Have hymnbook. Have laid
fingers on rosary strings, plucked
like lyres their clatterwood. Coughed incense. Adored
precisely as instructed. Stood Passiontide vigil, then sexted
at noon. Cast bone die to prophesy
dyings, told
beads their more sorrowful mysteries. Rehallowed
insomnia to Compline then...

Stress is very important to me.

Such were they, a dumb stuffed thing
to say, if truth is we all grow old un-
 
observed, limbs flail only halfway up
a flight, where does dark begin settling
 
my little bones. I dream and do love
to have them, blue fish
 
in a lake,...

Dawn marks the wall
 
a thin flange of
off-blue
 
An imagined
silence
 
Always an imagined
silence
 
The speed
at which sleep’s
fogged dialogue withers
 
into the present
noun-scape
 
This rift valley
 
A volley of
seasonal beacons
 
Window
where mind
 
finds orbit
 
     +
 
All a world can do
is appear
 
The window
intones
 
A room
whose walls
 
warp with sun
 
What’s seen
is dreamed
 
We think
ourselves here

We knew something was wrong when next to the TV, a large tomatillo plant was growing out the carpet. Everything there spoke, Table, Lamps    ...    

In the living room, Coffee Table’s eyes glued to the TV: flags, drums, hands on the chest...

People like to mock my town, they mock it
for being too provincial and too boring
and it’s true, not much of import happens here
but I don’t mind. Some people say, when they are asked
what they like about Palmerston North,
that you can...

End of the day. A bar where you ought to leave a tip.
The green bird was saying pretty pretty pretty,
loved ones were walking home across the city.
I waved at the girl who waves her whip    ...    
but please be certain I’m a...

We smuggle crates of Beaujolais
through the squeaky pantry door.
We steal cases of cigarettes,
borrow the bulletproof
Mercedes to race through
the capital’s empty streets.
It’s wonderful, the peace.
No local can afford a car,
except the police.
The police stand beside their cars and wave.
The police lack...