Three Poems

[The emblem of society was called ‘conscience’]

The triumph of the nick is the unconscious fantasy
    of those who scratch

a blandness of dinner in Herr Heimlich’s studio
    restructures his genome

since my purpose is to partake in legacies of thought
    how dreary should the derby

this dissolving writ should be like a bald eagle
    with ketchup on its talons

a spotless glass tumbler in the blink of an eye
    between the nothing before and after

begin again: Would you die to satisfy yourself
    in some verifiably perfect literature

an inner England scrumming like a fraternity of indents
    tripping over themselves to outrun stupidity

a stochastic twang, echoing in the toilet bowl
    of world literature; sunspots on stippled hands

for a while, I thought this vision a mermaid, a fragment
    so obscure—the breathwork of uncle junk

bracketing an inner racetrack with a jungle gym
    at its center, a pressure cooker called succor 

*

I thought, taking the perspective of nature
    there’s nothing objectively wrong with plagiarism

then was lanced, scalded, and buried
    half-alive with my twin, a bisque figurine

aside from the family romance, I was a brother
    in other respects: That is, no man, but chickenshit

unceremoniously promoted to the status of guy
    a Daruma doll in a bentgrass school

how is a solidly built Anglican like toiling
    in a world map of unfilled stars

marching in wool shorts toward abandonment
    and belly scritches, bewildered

promoting the works of one who said, “The sky is
    falling,” begetting a circumstance

dubbed believing one’s own two eyes, who later
    dragged a filthy Swiffer in Albuquerque

heroism is an import from thinking—what started
    as an amusement metastasized

what was then called an innocent gaiety
    takes the social form of authentic narration

kisses: We once thought them fortifications
    in our stand against the caprices of time 

*

Thought their sentience unflagging; wanted
    our innermost names beaten clean out of us

but this is prosaic—a letter dictated by a bourgeois
    nonentity with unclear seriousness

a fold dividing astrology and psychology
    on which werewolf graffiti dangles

and up which the memories of babelike jarheads
    have hoisted irrational naval colors

she called them glamours, the duplicities
   of the psyche, but could identify no tradition

from which the name had arisen. I wished
    to gain wisdom from recitation but found there only mind

whining highly, dim as a bulb in a broom closet
    until it was time to stand and applaud

we begin as gluttonous swine, and end, if we’re lucky
   guitar picks in a junkshop dish

we begin as crosshairs and end, if we’re lucky
    overlapping fabric straps forming the seat of a chair

[Fisherman and shepherds]

String a line between two cans and let the language trot
  out a ubiquity mussed by demolition solvents

that’s that vertigo I felt when we got truly lost for the first time
  near the beginning of the ropes course in the dark

wood next to the PepsiCo campus . . . it was more extensive
  than I had imagined and also more haunting, and less barren

a certain Dan in our group had just come from church
  and took it upon himself to lead a kind of demonstration

there was wetness on the black stumps; a hush was filled
  with the drilling of a chipping sparrow, an adolescent male

exhibitionist, being one who was secretly never housebroken
  a survivor of too many nights in the life of asbestos

an expression of life shot vertically from a canon
  whose parabola basically describes the trajectory of public favor

such was the sutra of that demonstrative bird, and this
  is the last thing I’ll say about it: If you get a chance

to press your face into the feathers of a chipping sparrow
  smell its discontinuity with description, especially

this one, so senseless I should probably strike it
    from the sense record before it becomes my writing 

*

I have moved to preserve the integrity of a chair
  when I could not preserve integrity of my own life

there would be a respectable inefficiency, renaming every iota
  of experience “windfall number x,” etc., a trophy wanting

that might set the stage for a personal revolution, or at least
  provoke the destruction of a few street signs last night

here, I should pause to add that in a quest for renewal
  we are permanent beginners; our stories become hinterlands

in which lost boys, repressed, but roaming ahead,
  bowl over a fastidious man in a hat, winding him

there he dances, there he dreams, reposes, and also blinks
  urinates frequently, and flinches when another dog barks

Regret is this man’s name. He once planned to race, fast as hell
  to every outpost in need of a detective

but let’s unzip the stanzas under which he camps
  that he monitors for holes in case of rain

I like to tramp in his little main area, a ragged yard
  where it smells of filth, and in my memory a red Kong bounces

in my tramping, I am like that man; though I am not that man
  we are similar mainly in our thinking, deeds, and attire 

*

I am less fond of his other area
  where a furious wind whips the tombs of his exes

in theory, one can kick back there and unwind without fear
  of starring in any clip or seeing one’s name in print

one placard reads “Tess,” and who was that? A bomb
  threat who reorganized pleasure on the level of possibility

before steady work held any appeal, Amsterdam was their only plan
  —he looks back now and wishes to descry its allure

damn! he really does—but that wish is only a common disease
  one must treat with an herb like calendula

then stifle to death with an ode, then kick and kick, even after
  it has already been kicked to death twice today

I just want you to remember with me the exsanguination of desire
  that always follows a good roll in the mud

walk through our ages with me, as in a crazy timelapse. Gaze
    on our aging while nibbling popcorn and feeling silly

for outsourcing the proper experience of aging to a machine,
    a narrative machine, in this case an idea

borrowed from the technology of cinema; then make the animal image
    of dotage, a naked head inscribed with certain immutable laws

[The crippling involution of ‘nature’]

Through many enervating nights I’ve turned my camera on,
  often after a helping of sherbet and a round of tangrams

light is beginning. It is beginning to dabble in foundering
  Light has its seven irredeemable faults, Rebecca

brings water to a simmer. And what comes after
  in the teleological narrative of water, heat, and time

happens after nightfall, in defunct train yards
  beyond the yards shown on government maps

where you sight a mole person’s last graffito, a message
  lost to sun and air, but this sober tag still functions

being a bug in the student portal where a tuft of hair
  might grow, a catkin on one branch of atrophy

in summer, when the Irish gap years clump
  on balconies, make blood pacts on San Pablo

and even in winter, when school was supplanted
  by the tempo of shooting stars zipping up the mild sky

we must study the gravesites that are our first impetus
  for denial, from which Western culture gains particulars

we must steep in the gardens of Palestine, especially after
   night has fallen, and wail in key of the living 

*

Chugging rivers of Constant Comment furtively
  so as to mitigate the effects of last night’s bender hopefully

gathering information from a muddy puddle that reflects
  my self-images, each of which comes apart so easily

Sunday in the downhill race—my heteronomy lags
  behind my neighbor’s, whose morals forbid learning

then his tensile rigging suggests a dungeon below
  learning, where the distant cries of fallen warriors undergo

archival mitosis, their long journey toward mewling analogous
  to the homing of vampire fangs toward a fair neck

really, it was a best practice developed in a feeling mode
  by starlight beings who mostly dwell in a whirring spacecraft

they wear their lowland pelerines like ordained killers
  of peasants used to do; their laughter shakes their toes

there is a simple logic to the address of their distant bosses
  it amounts to a tender letter to every fallen intellect

I did not know how our own suburb in time stirred
  your memory, arousing your hate like a low fog over a lawn 

*

Most of what I imagine is gleaned
    from an urban legend with its seed

in an old war song, a festive song
    the fruit of a commoner

is spontaneous mutations
    of balladry, that common

 source that is like a salt lick
    —bitter, enduring, almost nutritional

raunchy—one can’t predict that
   exchange: Endless hammering

 in the street for pure melody
   one hangs tight, receptively

like a monarch touching down in a bar
    his wings broadcast a midlife crisis

then, “splat!”—some punk
    asserts the natural order

the diorama we look to
    for entertainment

sick me on these beers, that I might
    remember to never go home

so long as exultation
    can still take over from me

that high arrives to help us both
    stomach a night of self-immolation

at the end of which, dawn
   will be shot, stuffed, and mounted

beers, help me forget the real war
   is not logomachy—

though the integrity of each stable
    dialectic, especially self and state

depends on its virtual battles
    mind being a march from “I was”

a proposition of solidity
    across a beating “I am”

through military
   ashes “I will be”

then a single tulip raised up
   like a blood blister

on the barren season
    —all around

the air raised up a searing falsetto
    from a prior stillness

∩

Parker Menzimer is the author of the chapbooks Aion’s Ribbon (Inpatient Press) and The Links (1080press). With Maxwell Paparella, he is co-author of Towpath to the Interior (The Double Tied Press), a braided cinquain diary. His poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in A Public Space, Annulet, Prelude, Tagvverk, Works & Days, Second Factory, and elsewhere. His writing has received support from the Truman Capote Literary Trust and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He serves as Public Programs Director at the Poetry Society of America and, with Terrence Arjoon, coedits the print magazine poetry2.