The Fictitious Glow of Distant Stars
All autumn
and into winter
your mouth
is a garden
covered with lions
and strutting
tuba players,
and that is why
festival lights go on
in the villages
and we enter
the castle together,
cities of the end
just beyond hearing,
long and dark
and giggling
uncontrollably.
The Part I Don’t Get
From infancy, the gods grow wan and disagreeable. Someone should tell them that poor hygiene doesn’t make you look bad ass, just disinterred. Then the scene changes. A burned girl, about 10, with a morphine drip, is talking up a credit economy based on an eternal future. It’s the part I don’t get. By morning, a hill of surplus chainsaws has appeared where the great blue heron used to stand on one leg posing for snapshots. The call centers in Kathmandu must have been busy all night. Often I can feel smiles and tears, cheap plastic chess pieces, moving around inside my head.
Artificial Hells
The animal is decapitated and gutted. The hooves are then cut off. It hurts. A lot. I’ve seen Reservoir Dogs. The guy was shot in the stomach, if I remember rightly. A head shot with a large bullet would be like switching off a light. Being shot isn't like in the movies. A 9-year-old Pennsylvania girl wearing a black-and-white Halloween costume was shot in the shoulder by a shotgun-wielding relative who mistook her for a skunk. There will never be silence.
Howie Good's latest book of poetry is The Complete Absence of Twilight (2014) from MadHat Press. He co-edits White Knuckle Press with Dale Wisely, who does most of the real work.