Scott Abels
5 poems
**
from Locus: A Choose Your Own Adventure Series
**
Prefix, in the US
they say if you dress up like a lunatic on Halloween
you disrespect the true lunatics. They are further marginalized,
& this keeps them from treatment. & me
all dressed up like Machu Picchu again
because it’s Columbus day.
Go looking for ghosts
& there is no action.
If nothing is happening
it is still possible
to make things happen.
Prefix, I met the most beautiful Mexican woman.
I’m pretty sure it was the day before
the day of the dead. Watch
she said & she emptied an ash tray
onto her crotch
(not buts, just ash) & in short, I was sad.
She said her grandfather had taught her that.
I swear you have been here.
You threw three ships
into my window. Pink, tink, and the third one
shattered the glass
because it was a brick, & me,
like any lonely man leaning out a window
muttering
this is the bitter end of banter
my very dead friend
my lips all sliced up.
Love,
Suffix
**
Suffix, today I’m taking architecture as the primary device
so that giving up some things
to achieve concentration
so that coming home
into the drafty cabin
through the new red door
won’t be so hard.
At the old neighbors´ rummage sale
I could not see for the smoke.
I could see nothing but smoke, and my list
of necessary materials was getting longer.
The construction workers
had cussed so much
given the sheer size of the site
and the impossibility of the mathematics
and sorcery involved in the project,
taking architecture as the primary device,
knowing, if you do,
something of my motivation,
forgive me, I was busy
building a bridge
based on the old plans for a dam.
Suffix, we should no longer
take space as the central fact.
See the death of geography,
geography as we’ve known it to be,
never having been mourned properly,
as at the top,
as at its tip,
sure as shit I believe in the holy.
Sacred is a way we conflate tired words
in a childish time,
Mexico, how far
you have come to say soul
vagrant as any pronoun.
Love,
Prefix
**
Prefix, imagine all things wrong have broken.
Black magpies making the sound of
dial up internet and us sitting in the sun.
I do not know how to ask
for a sling shot or for bread.
Suffix says he is certain everything is receiving
regular injections of oil.
The sending of a fax
to your face by birds.
A team of locusts
emptying the fields in Acapulco.
And in the North, if they would only burn the agave,
there could be corn for next season.
Suffix was coming up with original ideas.
I was finally relieved from constantly
trying to think of something funny to say.
We were reading back issues of the New Yorker.
We were reading criticism of the war and imagining
they were the future. Prefix, time
being more important than place,
in the well lubricated future
and the hypothetical past
the thing about the future is
you don’t need to know how it all fits together.
The food the host makes is always too hot to eat.
Lunch was a bowl of mustard.
A decision of the instant.
One fast move or we’re done.
Think about all the pardons and regards,
the bids and reproves coming down the line.
You don’t tell god about clouds.
Check if your fly is open and go in.
Love,
J.P Harplove
**
Prefix, after Hart Crane,
pigeons are permitted their entrance.
The fountain offers just enough noise.
Often I am permitted an intemperance.
The essential pleasure
of say that’s pretty.
All this keeps the water from touching
the green. The simulacrum
for the gesture
of generosity. Prefix,
as long as vision is bigger
than the proportion of reality
the water will be difficult to drink.
The most common instance
is the fountain out of commission.
The only effect registered was pleasure.
Topicality.
Symmetry, not modesty.
The source is the city.
Facing up & falling down.
I was not ready,
and I was not invited.
Then, the pigeons
numbering in the twenties, muttering
no strong drink.
The heat. The beach. The couples.
Ugly singles getting lucky magically
with whiskey.
If you want to find me, I am sorry.
Fountains are for temperate climates.
Poorly maintained, the stain
is green and all wrong
to the construction. & me
crying, my chemicals
are off.
A point of emergence.
Love,
Suffix
**
Our differences, I will call them Proverbs.
How quickly we took over
our corners of the house. How early.
Compassion was never possible. Empathy
is only imagination, Suffix,
now I can see you, recalling a time
when all nipples pointed to the sky
and practicing your tropical bye-bye.
The maritime kind of overboard. Hart Crane,
Hart Crane, nearly always faulted out of love.
What you have said makes little sense in the US.
The wound would be alone without the blood.
They only truth I know today is
the world just fucking loves ketchup so much.
Love,
Prefix
**
return to sawbuck 2.1
**
Scott Abels is from Nebraska, and he has an MFA from Boise State University. Currently, he lives and teaches on the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico. You can find his poems online at Action Yes, SHAMPOO, and No Tell Motel, and you can reach him at abelswichita@hotmail.com if you get lonely.
**
from Locus: A Choose Your Own Adventure Series
**
Prefix, in the US
they say if you dress up like a lunatic on Halloween
you disrespect the true lunatics. They are further marginalized,
& this keeps them from treatment. & me
all dressed up like Machu Picchu again
because it’s Columbus day.
Go looking for ghosts
& there is no action.
If nothing is happening
it is still possible
to make things happen.
Prefix, I met the most beautiful Mexican woman.
I’m pretty sure it was the day before
the day of the dead. Watch
she said & she emptied an ash tray
onto her crotch
(not buts, just ash) & in short, I was sad.
She said her grandfather had taught her that.
I swear you have been here.
You threw three ships
into my window. Pink, tink, and the third one
shattered the glass
because it was a brick, & me,
like any lonely man leaning out a window
muttering
this is the bitter end of banter
my very dead friend
my lips all sliced up.
Love,
Suffix
**
Suffix, today I’m taking architecture as the primary device
so that giving up some things
to achieve concentration
so that coming home
into the drafty cabin
through the new red door
won’t be so hard.
At the old neighbors´ rummage sale
I could not see for the smoke.
I could see nothing but smoke, and my list
of necessary materials was getting longer.
The construction workers
had cussed so much
given the sheer size of the site
and the impossibility of the mathematics
and sorcery involved in the project,
taking architecture as the primary device,
knowing, if you do,
something of my motivation,
forgive me, I was busy
building a bridge
based on the old plans for a dam.
Suffix, we should no longer
take space as the central fact.
See the death of geography,
geography as we’ve known it to be,
never having been mourned properly,
as at the top,
as at its tip,
sure as shit I believe in the holy.
Sacred is a way we conflate tired words
in a childish time,
Mexico, how far
you have come to say soul
vagrant as any pronoun.
Love,
Prefix
**
Prefix, imagine all things wrong have broken.
Black magpies making the sound of
dial up internet and us sitting in the sun.
I do not know how to ask
for a sling shot or for bread.
Suffix says he is certain everything is receiving
regular injections of oil.
The sending of a fax
to your face by birds.
A team of locusts
emptying the fields in Acapulco.
And in the North, if they would only burn the agave,
there could be corn for next season.
Suffix was coming up with original ideas.
I was finally relieved from constantly
trying to think of something funny to say.
We were reading back issues of the New Yorker.
We were reading criticism of the war and imagining
they were the future. Prefix, time
being more important than place,
in the well lubricated future
and the hypothetical past
the thing about the future is
you don’t need to know how it all fits together.
The food the host makes is always too hot to eat.
Lunch was a bowl of mustard.
A decision of the instant.
One fast move or we’re done.
Think about all the pardons and regards,
the bids and reproves coming down the line.
You don’t tell god about clouds.
Check if your fly is open and go in.
Love,
J.P Harplove
**
Prefix, after Hart Crane,
pigeons are permitted their entrance.
The fountain offers just enough noise.
Often I am permitted an intemperance.
The essential pleasure
of say that’s pretty.
All this keeps the water from touching
the green. The simulacrum
for the gesture
of generosity. Prefix,
as long as vision is bigger
than the proportion of reality
the water will be difficult to drink.
The most common instance
is the fountain out of commission.
The only effect registered was pleasure.
Topicality.
Symmetry, not modesty.
The source is the city.
Facing up & falling down.
I was not ready,
and I was not invited.
Then, the pigeons
numbering in the twenties, muttering
no strong drink.
The heat. The beach. The couples.
Ugly singles getting lucky magically
with whiskey.
If you want to find me, I am sorry.
Fountains are for temperate climates.
Poorly maintained, the stain
is green and all wrong
to the construction. & me
crying, my chemicals
are off.
A point of emergence.
Love,
Suffix
**
Our differences, I will call them Proverbs.
How quickly we took over
our corners of the house. How early.
Compassion was never possible. Empathy
is only imagination, Suffix,
now I can see you, recalling a time
when all nipples pointed to the sky
and practicing your tropical bye-bye.
The maritime kind of overboard. Hart Crane,
Hart Crane, nearly always faulted out of love.
What you have said makes little sense in the US.
The wound would be alone without the blood.
They only truth I know today is
the world just fucking loves ketchup so much.
Love,
Prefix
**
return to sawbuck 2.1
**
Scott Abels is from Nebraska, and he has an MFA from Boise State University. Currently, he lives and teaches on the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico. You can find his poems online at Action Yes, SHAMPOO, and No Tell Motel, and you can reach him at abelswichita@hotmail.com if you get lonely.
