jimmy-king
American
"So now there's nothing left to wish upon / Except for passing cars / The cacophony of city lights / Is drowning out the stars / This park bench is a life boat / And the rest a big dark sea / And I'm just gonna lie here until / Something comes and finds me" / Ani DiFranco
I felt biking up hill today fairly alive
And then I sit in stuffy dormrooms or walk through hallways
I crouch at desks to copy and paste old thoughts
I jog from toilet to shower to make it to class on time
And still I am three minutes late, like I
Wrote in my little notebook that “I have to stop
Letting my desire for something supersede my feelings for the individual people in my life”
But even as I wrote it
Pissingdrunk against the side of my friend’s pink house
I didn’t know what I meant, scribing only
So that I could figure it out later:
What the hell I meant by ‘desire’
What the hell I meant by ‘something.’
I felt biking up hill today fairly alive
And then I’m called upon to have opinions,
To finish my homework
To take out the trash
Or
To define ‘desire’
To define ‘something’
And then to flip the supersedence around,
Yes I am called upon by myself and myself only
So I’m not gonna finish my ******* homework today.
I’m gonna let the trash continue to rot.
I’m gonna define ‘desire’ as a product of rational society
And I’m going to define ‘something’ as the oppressor class
And I will fly past these nets
Like a proud and bold Icarus to
Sit on my bike
Remaining and lingering
As I move through temporal space.
And then I will love.
I will be loved.
I will be subject.
I will be humanized.
From an axiological point of view,
Anyway.
Sep 15, 2015
Sep 15, 2015 at 6:00 PM UTC
our circles of right and wrong,
fractured in absence of fickle zen,
stand now across the sky
diagramed on clouds in venn
and smiling the grey
blobs block the meteors;
it’s love of life that may
chain our bodies in the center
of that shifty airy water space
where waffles are gentrification
and the hands we hold are separation
and its happening everyplace
we go. so to talk and act
separately, is to deny that cloudy venn;
to go where mind is scarcely fact
and establish a dangerous distance
cuz yesterday I meditated
but today I must’ve particulated
cuz I see we’re one big contradiction
inside love that’s bound to mediation.
friere would say this occupation
is precisely our ontological vocation,
but to subjectify ourselves at the very
center of the venn is to carry
a weight upon the column
of my spinal cord unknown
even to the days
of my very best posture.
yet, your resistance to the slump—
it guides me to listen for the thump
thump of distant drums:
a revolutionary battlecry
through which I extend my hand
to hold yours across the waffled
space which we’ve so ******
our heartbeat races through my mind.
Aug 11, 2015
Aug 11, 2015 at 5:19 PM UTC
Part One
We sat on a strange wooden platform
Which hung suspended
From a strange metal structure.
And we kissed in the daylight
With cars passing by.
It struck me then
That I hadn’t kissed anyone in the daylight
With cars passing by
In over two years.
And I’d never before
Kissed anyone in the daylight
With cars passing by
Who identifies as a Marxist.
Or who loves Virginia Woolf.
Or who takes her sandals off to splash in muddy water without prompting and
Without even rolling up her jeans.
Or whose love of life captures her in the same contradictions as mine.
And I haven’t written a love poem
For someone who might also be writing me love poems
In over two years
But this is it.
Here it is.
This is it,
Here it is,
In four days
We will live in separate cities
And then I might not kiss anyone in the daylight
With cars passing by
For two more years
Or two more after that but
Such a possibility strikes me as unlikely.
Not because we can commute but because you showed me
As we hung suspended on a strange wooden platform
Kissing in the daylight
With cars passing by
(As we braved the mosquito bites in that field that night;
As we waded through the creek today
While thunder cracked all around us
And rain poured down right upon us)
That I am someone who someone worth loving
Can find worth loving.
Part Two
Or hang on.
It doesn’t have to be like that.
It doesn’t have to be like kale soup,
Which has been connoted for me as representing the preservation of tradition and community while effecting radical change within the food system.
It can instead be like artichokes
Which I just like
For no ******* reason
Other than that they’re good.
We each got over 40 mosquito bites because,
While we lay in a field under the, like, five stars that decided to show themselves at the peak of the Perseides meteor shower,
We were too busy making out to give a ****
And it was fun.
It was fun, and tonight when we got dinner and you asked me to explain why I liked artichokes so much
We abandoned our tradition of narrative, us English majors, and we decided to study Sociology,
Because sometimes it’s better to look at how things are
Before you even ask yourself why.
Aug 3, 2015
Aug 3, 2015 at 11:47 PM UTC
yes, this city
is awe-inspiring.
graceful.
the sheer height
of kroger's hq,
the intrinsic intimacy
of the 5/3 dome, yes
grace
is the only word.
when the sun is setting,
i mean.
when the light
shines on the columns of windows, the buildings
slide startlingly out of focus to become something almost real,
something almost untainted by glass, uh--
a sunset.
a river.
the buildings wiped almost
out of existence
by
that river. a river
that gushes, changing with every second yet
remaining. constantly
in its pose of watermotion and water-
grace.
but then the sun fades away
and the neonlights come on,
and the moon
is far too faint and the buildings
cast shadows that are far too wide
and reality is submerged and we
are submerged.
we need another glint.
another light.
we need to turn the stillness
of this night
into a movement,
and yes,
we need to be prepared,
just in case--
we have to fight.
Jun 15, 2015
Jun 15, 2015 at 9:40 PM UTC
your lips hung, slightly parted,
as you slept through the morning.
your face was smooth
and your tiny nose ring glinted
in the light that passed through the pine trees
and into our tent.
i stared at you, over there, for a long time
from where i lay in my sleeping bag, over here.
i knew that, just as it happened two years ago
when we lay in the bed at my mother’s house,
having spent the night together for the first time,
your eyes would slowly flicker open to meet mine
and i would somehow have to account
for why my gaze was already fixed on yours.
i prepared a hundred different good-mornings,
some chipper
(“good morning!”)
and others saddened
(“hey, good—um… good morning.”)
or only a little bit saddened
(“hey there. good morning.”)
just to seem more natural even though
they were all still going to be a little bit
too chipper.
but i looked away at just the right moment and you muttered,
in your tired voice,
“how did none of the rain get into the tent?”
so all my preparations were obsolete.
i told my mom tonight,
that we’re no longer whatever we were
and it was only the fourth time i can really remember
tearing up in front of her,
although it surely happened quite frequently
when i was younger. after
scraping a knee, for instance, or
getting scolded by my brother.
the skin on my knee has healed now though,
so i’m thinking i’ll just try
not to be so concerned.
about anything, really.
Jun 2, 2015
Jun 2, 2015 at 12:54 AM UTC
the rows of roads and skyscrapers are rolling like
breakable hills above us
and under us
the waves are crashing
into
silicon valleys
made of thick
rubber
which carries no charge. but
here we are in the middle.
y’all make me feel outside of it and
inside of myself, cuz i am not
thick rubber and i am not
a breakable hill.
i am a body
sitting in the front seat
of my car,
driving down the highway,
and singing
at the top of my lungs
to nothing in particular.
May 22, 2015
May 22, 2015 at 12:39 AM UTC
“How long do these bloom?” I ask her,
Standing in the night,
The nascent springwarmth fading around us.
As the moon plots its course
Across the thin line of sky it will occupy tonight, she says,
“For a very very short time.”
We lay in the wetgrass for a bit then,
And once the moon has gone and the sun is close to rising
We part. It feels
For a moment
Like she is all the places I never went,
Still ringing loudly in my mind with obsolete importance—she is
A bandaid on soft skin,
Covering numbness.
Not pain.
Three days later
The blossoms fall from the trees in a storm
And the ground is littered with shards of pink.
Walking back along the river,
My bandaid torn off such that it ripped out all the littlehairs,
I smell them:
The tendersweetness mushed against the pavement
Under runningshoes and bicycles and myfeetnow.
Wafting through the air much more fiercely
Now that each flowerfiber is torn.
All year I stood amid a forest of cherry trees, all in bloom.
And I got so used to the smell.
May 11, 2015
May 11, 2015 at 10:57 PM UTC
I thought of you today when I noticed the dirt underneath my fingernails
And when I felt the wind in my hair as I flew down a hill on my bike
And when I stared at the Hocking River again as it gently swirled downstream.
When I realized I’d be going to bed early and
When I thought about sleeping alone,
As I do almost every night.
When I decided to go the long way home.
When I sat down on a bench, ate a granola bar, and sipped away the rest of my water.
When I threw my shovel aside and dug with my hands.
When I wiped the sweat from my brow.
When I looked at my Aloe Vera plant and realized I hadn’t watered it in a while.
When I watered my Aloe Vera plant.
When I left the dinner table before the rest of my friends to call my grandma
Who once told me that you and I should get married.
When I laughed at my own thoughts
And when Ani DiFranco came on my Spotify.
I don’t exactly know what I mean
When I say I thought of you.
I don’t know anything exactly, I mean
What if the universe jumps erratically through temporal space,
And each moment only seems continuous cuz we only remember what came “before” it, as we say?
When I say that, when I think about that,
I guess I’d call that thinking about you.
I thought about you when I thought about
Getting ice cream
And when I thought I got a splinter,
Neither of which
Actually happened.
Apr 5, 2015
Apr 5, 2015 at 11:23 PM UTC
For almost two years we’ve been sitting on a conveyor belt
Heading straight for the potato peeler, which will
Slice right through our thickened skins and puncture our vitals;
A cold cruel machine designed to sit
In industrial kitchens
Waiting for Sodexo’s next batch.
But we—
We’re from the farmer’s market and we are not
Four inches in diameter and six inches in length.
We are clunky. We are knobbled. We are
Purpleyellow and we are waterysweet.
We are not
Iowabland or a poem of rhyming couplets, yeah
We are free verse and we
Had *** because we’re friends.
Or maybe because
We love each other
In one way or another.
Or maybe because we’re lost
Or maybe all of the above, yeah—I don’t know, I just know
The potato peeler won’t accept us for a second.
That mechanical grip, slicing slicing slicing,
A fumbling tumbling in countless browntowhite progression,
It won't accept
Our color, our flavor, our beautiful swirling eyes,
And for a while I didn't either.
But whether we have two more months on the belt or twenty years,
I know that our knobbled progression to nowhere
Will have been one of everywhere.
Apr 4, 2015
Apr 4, 2015 at 8:30 PM UTC
Ash from two cigarettes on the stone pylon beneath my feet,
I **** yellowbrown into the Hocking.
My stream meets the river on a riptide,
Carefully crafted from the funneled remnants
Of melted snow and torrential rain
Just to give off the illusion of chaos.
Forms of spectacular watermotion grace the noonday clouds,
And despite their haste, too high on molly,
There’s something hanging in the stillness beneath the mudbrown surface—
Some epiphanic moment that rapidity and angerwaves
Refuse to force out of sight; some
Strand of smoke, still floating upwards from the dampened cigarette ash
Abandoned twelve hours prior; some
Slurred-drunken word, tinged anyways with meaning.
The lips I kissed after climbing back onto the bridge the night before
Proved to be less than irrelevant (screaming later, as they did, someone else’s name
While I lay listening, still half thinking that
Maybe she’d just gone upstairs for some floss). But
The fact that there were lips there at all,
In the rain
Under the stars
Over the Hocking
Issuing with reverence the words “magical” and “perfect”
Through the darkness of the night and the echoes of Joni Mitchell’s voice…
It’s something worth noting, despite the angerwaves;
Something worth feeling
Despite the noonday clouds and dampened ash.
Now that I’ve screamed at the river and ****** on it with a harshlaugh,
I think I can also
Find a moment to give it thanks.
Because I’m off the pylon now.
I’m back on the bridge. And I’m walking South
With the flow of the Hocking, back into Athens.
And I am finally
(The rain beating against my face, my clothes, my mind)
So very here.
Mar 16, 2015
Mar 16, 2015 at 1:35 AM UTC