Baltimore
How do you people get to the other end of the day?
With the lights off I can notice that autumn has a higher pitch
coming in through the window now, summer’s drone and growl interplay
abandoned for the cleaner sounds that hiss and scratch,
the fizzing leaves, the leaving car trailing,
my baby snoring through a cold, warm on my lap,
the trees whispering contending with their sap, the swing’s jangle rising then failing
as the leaves subside their effervescence and I can hear the pavement
where feet and leaves move down the street to a point
and are lost. This beautiful night I feel partitioned from these moments;
separate from all world; my eyes are out of joint.
Earlier, worm dragged black across the wet walk,
with a wake like a finger on a mirror,
its gills stripped off of mucus felt like chalk
in its little worm soul where the segments get near.
Where the salt climaxed into a mountain
the car camera had clotted with rain.
I can only be inside now of a moment that I hate.
I held the umbrella ineloquently bent
over the parking machine. Why can’t
I think of someone else I know but
I get sick? My mind is full when I resent.
I lingered at the warming bathroom vent.
Dreaming is at best ambivalent respite:
southern marshes spotted with dying white horses,
and eagles riding waves where the estuary forces
ocean that I’m agog at with the strangers on the dark sand spit.
Always the waves come up to the upper porch
and we huddle there with the family I never see as waves approach
and drop after awareness disappears.
There’s sickness there that matters less because less clear,
but I mostly would send back my dreams,
my inside images mostly just a queasy cram
I’d crawl from. I’d sleep if it were black indifferent cream.
In the morning, my autumn daughter in white light feels watched
and quoted, and it’s raining orange needles on the girl.
The maples contain us in cathedral splotches,
furious lizard orange, and the baby bending down goes slow to touch,
as she stooping separates the pebbles in the loch water,
and a wasp mostly swamped buzzes sideways in the lapping
toward us and she gets afraid with laughter,
then settles down to silence to watch damp flapping
rehabilitate the bug, but I’m not there.
He’s gentle with himself like he’s a pupa.
I can no longer participate in the beauty of the world.
Thoughts Other than Whiskey, and a Heron in the Snow
I would kill for any other thought than whiskey
I could be induced to kill perhaps too easily
The heron flies over the frazzling bluff
of snow below the stubbled field of dead corn plants
Stiff brown sunflowers, corpse faces of seed,
hold snow in leathery rows
Brown battalions tickle into distance
The oceans recede
and what bodies have been left?
Cardinal puts its foot in the stream’s white valley
(The snow is blue in the dark of the valley)
Dry crystals blow pale orange;
their breeze has a clean chatter
The defunct gas station sucks in clouds
I’m in search of a need
that can be met
“...time is unredeemable”
A monstrously large, inverted strawberry
with the flowing medieval body of a serpent
and worms flossing the flesh of its face,
upside down crosses for feelers,
friezes on my daughter’s block
The nail rusts into wood a rot the color of burning,
contagious oxidations
The experience of time itself is temporally extended even if time is not “real”
so maybe it makes more sense to talk about “time things”
as just a category of things with that property,
contingent on the timeless structures,
the things that are like time and which account for its creation,
like the flint is similar to flame,
or the invisible wave is similar to blue?
I don’t need the nihilism of the wave, of the eternals,
the nihilism of transcendence
always
If you’re far enough away it is a vitrine where time has occurred
that you can hold close to your chest
This mirror is sticky and green already in March
Atom and Void
Where sun flings on seven left leaves,
a yellow catalyst burns
The flaked bone branches of the sycamore
are atom and void
Acid and void
in seven leaves
A hawk grabbed a finch
from above my car
The sharp fingers were void and atom
The warm finch chest cradled by sharpness
was atom and void
The sun around the finch was void waves
After
The jellied mammals
desiccate to death over the course of the tide
that drains for days.
The night rests in its stall for days.
There are mustard bursts of the dead in the meadow,
and iridescent horse hides,
and the shore is a black peach from the fire.
We must race the dolphins to drowning at this bottom.
Chernobyl Pear
If Chernobyl had been made of God, this is the region
We follow only the path of the magnet
We can never enter the room that completes this
The ice freezes in wet spines then rough sheets
This god is of bulbs as deep and implicit as melody
This is the region of a god as decomposed into anatomy as a daffodil
When I got back from the desert the mailbox had a handful of cockroaches
and I loved the overwhelming life of that
and let them swarm my hand without moving
That is the blessing without intention that the desert gave to me
I am thirsty enough to love the water in a roach
This is the blessing of each winter with no mouth or brain
I wipe the black from my mouth into the snow
I most want to be ajar
Winter is as empty as one’s face on fire
You will live in the green stain of a cellular heaven
I need to live on pleasures with no appetite
light without heat
to be able to stand sober
for an alley of fireflies
lightning capriciously
over trashcans and out of date cars
with no compulsion
When I think of giving back the gift
I think of a blast of cool darkness through the forehead
and deeper parts of the brain
followed by the warm half-pleasures of opiates
I think of it as a sensation like any other
which is why I’m not ready
I think of it as the fire in the pit near the moss and the camellia
but it is so different from sensation
that it would make my brain peel
it is so different from thought, this annihilation,
so for now the only thing that exists is, for instance, the black lamp as tall as me
with yellow glass bumpy with an image,
catching evening light in October
in a garbage-y part of Baltimore, and it does not exist as anything
more than an understanding leaving minds, a passing through,
a roman candle’s thunk and light, and then the smolder of the candle after,
showing it was all just the process of returning to the atmosphere, all the smoke at the edges,
the wave dripping back from the beach with the noise of gnats in autumn
Jackson Wills lives in Baltimore with his daughters and wife and feral chihuahuas with rotten teeth that he took from the streets of Las Vegas. He works in a liquor store at night, and takes care of his babies in the day and writes early in the morning if at all. Versions of these poems and all the others in the book started as Instagram posts documenting the granules and flotsam of all that, so follow him at jacksons_username. Seven thousand people watched one of the videos, which seems weird, crazy, wrong. He’s got a whole essay about it, if method interests you.