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Silver Bone
The floor no longer feathered in love letters,
The bed no longer containing even a single fallen hair
From your head.
Time has passed
Yet
The memory of you is a crook in the corner
Of night
Where a broken bone
The color of silver is
Barely jutting from shadows
In the reliable terror
Of relentless moments
Lying in this bed that used to hold you
While I held you.
That Fool with Docile Wings
How many secrets can you keep?
I hear you mutter in your sleep
I feel the movement of your lips
Your tongue, however, never slips
Am I just someone for the night
That in the day you hide from sight?
Who sees you by the dimmest star
A silhouette of who you are
Just an actress in a part
Whose role is to decay my heart
You say your words but they’re just noise
Why waste the truth on silly toys?
It’s broke malnourished boys like me
Who let you turn your magic key
You wind it up and when you do
I want your lies to all be true
I am that fool with docile wings
Not interested in beads or strings
Not gaudy glass, but wood and fire
Fidelity the binding wire
So keep your secrets in your lap
My mind to never have a scrap
Will you remove your magic key
And find another fool like me?
One day I will taste the sting
The day that I know everything
The last time you will care to see
The lackwit fool who once was me
There is No Poetry
There is no poetry.
There is no poetry anymore.
There is no poetry in the coffeehouse.
There is no poetry in the outhouse.
There is no poetry in the prison, in the nuthouse,
In the forest, in the park,
Gliding across the lake like a parasailer,
Hidden in the nooks of the houses and apartments
Of us, the living dead.
No—because the professors came
And, with them, their sycophants and students
And dew-eyed ingenues.
The professors came and plucked the poetry from the air,
Scrubbed the walls of the prisons and the nuthouses
And the untidy public park restrooms.
The professors all determined to fix the poetry.
The professors came armed with their perspicacity,
With their persnickety curmudgeonliness, with their student-teachers behind them
And their MFAs in their right hands waved highly—
They came and they sprayed the gardens of poetry with poison.
They came and planted a bland tasteless fungus in all the flower beds
And now the flowers are dead, the fungus spread.
There is no more poetry under fingernails
Or in the engine of an abandoned car rusting beneath the bay.
There is no more poetry in the lumberjack’s ax
Or in the dirty dishes lying in the sink.
No, the professors came and they scrubbed every pebble on the beach
For hours and hours until a dull sheen emanated from over-studying
And purposely haphazard enunciating.
Their version of poetry like the guano of seagulls, congealed on every available surface,
Baking brutally in the sun.
Look how shiny this new substance is that has replaced poetry.
You can turn it sideways and upside down—still it reveals nothing.
How healthy! How it gleams without gleaning! How it makes you yawn and stretch,
Telling you it’s time to go to bed.
The coffee houses should be burned out like dangerously dusty brush
And the same torch taken to the universities where the professors propagate
In the abandoned libraries between the D.H. Lawrence and the ee cummings.
Watch them scatter like termites, like cockroaches, like rats in the kitchen light—
Their all-the-same words in flames, turning orange then black.
Crush their smoldering fecal poesy under rebellious boots—
Scrape it off with a sharp stick and then burn the stick, too.
Tell Carl Sandburg it’s okay to come out of hiding—
We’ve burned it all up. The classes have been canceled
And the workshops all shuttered.
We will roll away the stone from the cave-tomb
And see
Sandburg coming out with a long white beard,
Shading his eyes from the light he remembers well.
Soon he will be re-acclimated—we all will.
Men and women will once again sit alone in a room without air
And write poetry
With blood and darkness,
With fury and a madman’s wrath.
No one will give a flying fuck about your pronouns anymore
Or where you studied or who under.
Just write something interesting.
Please.
John Tustin’s poetry has appeared in many disparate literary journals since 2009 and his published poetry can be found here.