poetry
i seen signs
a prose poem by jacob berg
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go go go go and what’s stupendous. alligator jaw know all he know not, swaying in tangerine backlight, kissing his limbs and digits across a furnace of fire.
the time were lingered on the back of my pillow, drool apuddle as my lasting night drill holes in all teeth. brown and crumbling where the let go make tunes twice the width of a river.
make no light the anger of the wrecking plume, the cast quiver detecting doom. naked upon the most lasting truth that black light holes up, peers around the redbrick corner, cobblestone alley full of armor and pleasant death.
campbell was his name, or so he told me (though the honest type goes far in another direction). icicle man, a frozen armed chap who blew glassy fangs along blanshard strolling humdrum and zigzag and reeking wretch like poison to shoeshined and shoeshine alike for only his own.
dropped he his acrid tape, his mewling patents on whatever egregious step a man might mark for symbol and cauterize on the parchments of death all carry. spat love potions silent and wicked on all passers casting no eye nowhere, seen what seen or how or when.
this, very this, campbell told me, was the opposite side of the moon. someways only looking where can never look. someways only past around and through or through and for or at and standing, stable as god’s own hell, his cryptic force like a pissing wind dying on the vine of living breath. no curse accumulating like sour grapes only felled to the floor lest they all ripen til they can be counted (note — counted was the name of our god).
some slimy vengeance what all asked after, naked pool of pleasure for a bath and all dive in and press against and scrub the broken flesh from their outsides and wrap themselves in all some sacred shawl of shared submersion, twirling over across and busting crack head hoopla from the highest office for these the colours of discontent say oh and ah and one or say one one one and say one is so next two is or say one is two is three is or say i and you or we and all we or say hex or say i i i i i i i and break so many spells of gut and grimace and money and money and money and money and time.
