Sample Poems by James Brock
The High-Wire Artist
No winged Mercury, no archangel
Michael, no god-light
save the sun, but our messengers
of the micro-chip to give
us word: O Verizon and Cingular
and Nokia, o sweet satellites,
through which digitalized
and transmitted, the voices
of the soon-to-be-lost and buried
speak. They say, “I’m okay.
I am coming down now.”
We have heard other messengers,
the billowing plume falling down
on New York, concrete and ash,
file cabinets, paper, and smoke,
and where children,
later, gather the half-burnt documents,
the resumes, the memoranda of transmittals,
the ledgers of stocks and holdings,
and the children show the cameras what
they have recovered, fisted blooms
of papers, yellow and pink and green,
every leaf a transaction, every line
a paen to exchange. Somewhere
in these children’s dusty hands
are our yesterday lives.
Of course we want to take something
back, something like time, back to when
we could see through the clumsy failings
and the routine hubris, say before
Richard Nixon’s resignation, before
Evel Knieval’s parachuting into the Snake
River Canyon, or back to when
the high-wire artist, a truly flying
Wallenda could astound us.
Let it be August 7, 1974,
and traversing the Twin Towers is
Philippe Petit, criminal funambulist,
who would later be arrested
and later do time
performing for children at Central Park, teaching
them the split-toe technique of tightrope
walking and the proper gripping
of the balance pole.
O Philippe, O wire walker, refrain
returning to the earth-bound
and remain thirteen hundred feet up,
too small for anyone to see,
between the towers,
lying on the tensile strands
as if they were a hammock,
where the breathing of the towers
shudders turbulent along your spine,
and all the world curves beneath you.
Because we fear it is only the wires
that are holding up those buildings,
hung and joisted to the sky’s ceilings
so unsteady now that we hold out
our hands against the buildings,
wishing to stay their outlines and erasures,
all the while knowing, Philippe, that for as long
as you remain suspended
on the high wire in the moment
before you leap to the platform,
nothing yet has spun
away from the heavens.
Water Event
Which is what every hurricane
is: water and its hydrokinetic engines,
its subanachronous rending of lunar
neap and spring tides, the centrifical
pull down of the earth’s own molten
spinning; water and its
agnostic birthing
of estuarine sloughs, gentlest watersheds
and waterpartings, the vapors
of any lung-bearing vertebrate’s exhale,
a bat’s breath; water and its
torrents within our cells. Today, for instance,
is the first after-rain since Hurricane Charley,
after the first droves of low planes
and helicopters surveying the damages,
one of which carries the President,
over Pine Island, over the Kingdom
of the Calusa—for him, too, the rain
has opened the air, a little de-ionized
wound, a cleansing bruise, its droplets
gulf-bound on the Peace River,
accumulating the alluvial deposits,
contaminate matter, metals, fossilized
giant sloth particles, salts, through lagoon,
through runnels, spates, and eddies,
ingested, absorbed, evacuated. And
now, the rain over me,
over the golf course pond in the gated
community, where emerges an anhinga
water turkeywhich gathers on
a landscape boulder, shakes
its wings in the misting drizzle, wings
outstretched, slaking drops
of the water of every hurricane.
Your Life as a Wealthy Man
You decided to give up the poetry thing,
made money as a script doctor, which got you
into real estate and land brokering, which got
you out of law school, which included a short
stint web-mastering an S/M gay porn
site, which lead to the gig as an investment
banker. You sold cars. You sold personal wealth
plans. You went in for futures trading. And let’s
say you made it easy. Here it is, the payoff:
you go to your female dentist from Brazil, her office
on upper 5th Avenue, and even the doormen
wear shirts that you would’ve paid your soul for
in your former life. They let you in. Her Brazilian
assistant, Moira cleans your teeth—she is blonde,
dark-eyed, and she is wealthy enough herself
to buy her own implants. She tells you she owes
no man anything. Dr. Pereira comes in, and she
smells of orchid and silver, and she’s likely Moira’s
older and prettier sister, the one with the wiles
to leave Brasilia and her father’s deputy
ministership, high-tail it to London, landing
in Manhattan. She puts her perfect tiny
fingers in your mouth. “Your gums are very
firm, James.” Of course, they are. And then
she makes the mold for the cracked tooth—it’s
a temporary job for now, and she gives the
mold to Moira, who takes it to the lab where
four cousins, each a virgin, each seventeen
years old, fashion the filling. Dr. Pereira
shakes the nova-demerol cocktail. “Do you feel
any pain, James?” No. Not at all. But you are
weeping, sitting on all this dough, knowing
you’ll have your own post-colonial island,
a porcelain cap, a titanium bridge,
weeping, weeping with money. And thus, it
is such a small mercy to issue, your own
private, final solution: Let every poem
be rounded up, blindfolded, and shot.
You could give those orders, with
these attendant women, your new world smile.
The Jim Brock Poetry Contest: Guidelines
Announcing the Jim Brock Poetry Contest. Entry limit: one poem. Your poem should be about your first feverish impulse to sing a noun that remains in the continuous past. Your poem should be about eggplants. Your poem should be about sumac leaves. Your poem should be about the physics of loss and abandonment. Your poem should be about the necessary locomotive that delivered you here and about the fuse you light to incinerate the tracks. Your poem should be heavy with oxygen. Your poem should praise your lover’s qualities, enough so that being male and female in any form startles you. Your poem should alienate you from all weather. Your poem should touch God in places only Emily Dickinson has dared touch. Your poem should raise from the grave your ghost twin. Your poem cannot save anyone. Your poem must be seven words or fewer, or two thousand lines or more. Entry fee: all of your boss’s money. Type your poem neatly on 8 1/2” X 11” standard-bond, white, non-erasable, 20# paper, recycled preferred. Destroy all copies of drafts. Submit by burning the poem outside, stirring the ash and the trace elements skyward, let them rise with the wind, so that they coil around the other entries, until they are one rise of smoke, indistinguishable from any distant cloud, perhaps nothing more than the wisp of a small burning, not even a luminance on the earth, just a softening in view. No matter. Everyone will win. The deadline is now.
My Feeding Tube
Directive: Spare no expense.
Be it so ordered that:
for my intake requirements,
have all ingredients chopped and liquefied,
40 grams of fiber, water soluble, daily,
no hydrogenated oils, and when possible,
use low-salt alternatives. To keep me going,
pulverize and mix with twice reversed osmosis
spring water pages from a Gutenberg Bible,
beginning with the Book of Job, and thereafter,
the Gospels, blessed by the new Holy C; blend
with a pint of blood from a near extinct
species, preferable mammalian; infuse
with the extract of the paper currency
of the U. S. Treasury and all the patent papers
safe-boxed by Monsanto; slice, super-heat,
and liquefy the heavy metals
and waste materials processed by the Turkey
Point nuclear power plant, and spoon off
a tablespoon of the oily scum; burn
away the tundra forest of the lower Yukon
and fine sift the ash, one pinch only, not even
a dash; scrap shavings from any Caravaggio
painting, one of his secular works,
and toss in finely minced shallots.
Be it so ordered that this be my first meal.
Be it so ordered that the Texaco Texas
City Oil refinery lay out a direct line
to my feeding tube, delivering
to me, at a pressure of 12 lbs. per in., grade C
crude, until drawing dry the National Reserves.
Be it so ordered that this be my second meal.
Be it so ordered that each member
of the United States Congress, of the U. S.
Supreme Court and Federal Appellate Courts,
of the President’s Cabinet, of the Office
of the Governor of the State of Florida,
be assigned to serve as an attendant nurse
for one month. The nurse must certify
that the food is processed to specifications.
The nurse must brush my teeth. The nurse
must allow me to soil the bedding.
The nurse must remove and save the linen,
with the befouled stains of shit and urine,
of salt and leeched toxins, of mercury
and silver,to display as the Shrouds
of Fort Myers, testifying that I am still
kicking, still sound, still a productive citizen.
Be it so ordered that the National Cathedral display
each new shroud daily.
Be it so ordered that the National Archives burn
its holdings to create space to preserve the shrouds.
Be it so ordered that CNN and Fox News bid over
airing rights to the live stream video—“Life Watch!”
Be it so ordered that the image of my face
fill the screen, only to be disrupted by the hourly
eye-drop ministrations by the nurse, by my mother
blocking the view as she cradles
my head, pointing to my eyes’ shifting to the light.
Be it so ordered that my father beam
at the heap of me, finally the good, obedient
son, the silenced boy, now, and
I become America’s living angel, anyone’s
dumb off-spring, so that everyone in the hospice,
including the producers and camera crew,
go godly, while the machine’s low grind surges
lightly, to keep up with this impossible appetite.
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