Sunday, October 16, 2016

Poetry By James Diaz

James Diaz is the founding editor of the literary arts & music journal Anti-Heroin Chic. heroinchic.weebly.com/ His work has appeared in Cheap Pop Lit, Ditch, HIV Here & Now, Foliate Oak, Pismire, Collective Exile and Epigraph. He lives in upstate New York.


Isolation Central (the gravity belt poem, midway)

Cagey it was all Cagney like
x amount of hair do
starving starlings
condom park police-less
hostile punked out love
a sweat bond, this was 90 no when/or/where

some tiny miracles mean more
than a meal a day

having any luck
is having too much for some

I bang on the roof of your car
you're so fucking philosophical during a crisis
you can't even hear
straight

I've become a raindrop
the city warns its children to be wary of

happiness is a metaphor for not knowing just how fucked up we are inside.


Poet James Diaz


I Kissed The Foot Of A Footman

as if I were Sheba
and you an igloo gut figurine

down the hall is an ex-con next to an ex-queen

I don't deserve the level of suspicion I get
stepping outside
you'd think I was a ball of light
eating the bottom out of the earth

only a fast food neon
hugging chem smell makes me human

are you home? I need my left shoe back.

I need my sole/soul back.


Typical Bastard 

Every lit down bar
stole some measure of my mind
had to give a social justice lecture
to an emotional/banker
was run down by Vance
he was no saint either

a god taken to freeway sleeping
the only after life
garbage breeze
setting water in a line
that travels nowhere

It's the day after the day before
you get one phone call
but numbers don't work
in this world

I'm a consumed bird, this is my life.


Tallest Building I Ain't Never

Spot me
or whatever
time the town closes
in an hour
as if
bartender
I didn't know
you live and
some don't
make it

dirty water drinking
sophisticated
subway conversations
by sterilized him and her
right next to those who are
already slowly dying
garbage bags on their feet

so annoying
but the i-phone
is outdated
graphic for sexual
service my end of the world
is bad day
hand bag
sold out

next
on line

next

there you are! Yes you!
The universe is in your back yard,
you are sixteen today
and your parents named you
after a vegetable,

Spinach Rodriguez
future Senator
earthly pain in the ass.

What world window
have you forgotten to close lately?

In there, look- some bent
in pain are watching
the day turn to night,
and sleep is beside the point

now

aren't you glad you came
for the drinks
but stayed for the social
consciousness?

Are we there yet?


The I Is Not Neutral 

That shit
is over
talking about what got you
here

you might need
me when I no longer
need myself

so

fuck this rehabilitation scheme
mumbling all the time

I feel...

right?

Somehow unresolved, no
I am a nervous wreck!!!

Ever walk into a department store
and suddenly realize that you're
not supposed to be in there
because you are fucking homeless
and being completely without
ontologically
is a crime

from which we don't recover?

Isn't that interesting?
From a rhetorical viewpoint,
which gender device
is the author employing
when he/she writes
'I no longer need myself'?

COLD, I CAN'T FEEL MY FEET
CAN'T YOU SEE HOW small my world
has become?

Class, what do we think,
should we give him some money
even if it gets spent on booze?


Thirty Years A Memory 

Tell yourself
how every island
lives with its own house
already sold
and how nothing grows
just because there is soil
and water available
to it.


Sometimes Silence Says it All

Parked her car out side
said Dale is at it again
been drinking on the job
lost it
and is taking it out on the kitchen table
axed it up
said he's building a boat
gonna sail around the world
see all the shit he never got to see
said he ain't interested in love anymore
even worse
says he don't know how much longer he can take it 
all the things they keep our of your reach
"I guess what I'm asking is, can I stay here the night"
we drink all night by the fire 
and I can see so much fear in her eyes
I don't know what to say
sometimes silence says it all.


Mood For Taro And Weeping 

I want to undo
your bra strap
with a willow
branch
from the back yard
of a forgotten philosopher
Canetti, Coldplay

apocalypse pouring
like water from
the cup of your hands

into chronic pulse
the quirk where
language seizes up
by the 'not now'
and 'night, over there'

are you a thing with
a clasp and a hook
or
are you a non-working phone booth in Berlin
hit by heavy rain,

a worn out waitress
with nowhere to go
and everywhere to be?

On my finger is the boundary
marker
for your strange mouth
bruised fruit
fit into earth
womb war mediated by puns

you hope hunger is a traditional
allusion to the inside
of translation, what comes out is;
the world is made from stories
you've never told.

After we fuck
let's pull out all of the bad radishes
from the garden
so that the vegetable roots of the young
will have room
for their errors

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