Jack Boettcher
3 poems
**
Autobiography is a Map of Ambiguous Origin, an Oath
We make some poor decisions
We buy up the shadows of clouds
and then think we own all the land
they pass over
I can’t tell
when another human being
wants to knife me
I can’t get that season back
The woman predicting my death
for a quarter at the state fair
yawned
and I ate another bite of fried pie
I couldn’t tell if “snake bit”
was a metaphor for outgunned in a duel
which is why I don’t trust metaphor
This summer I want to sleep on or wake up
on a comfortable couch
in this universe
If I awaken, I want to clutch a map
of a crooked wood
which requires no further explanation
or context, no conceit
At last the day rots leaving dusk
and if I follow a perfumed path
like the map says I’ll get dizzy
and hear beautiful music
There used to be a boys choir
a distillery forged from an old iron lung
hemmed off by poison ivy
but now there is no one, nothing
My farm is only a dream
that shows up as an error
on the hypnogram sometimes
because I can’t slaughter animals
because of postmodernism
And why would I engage in a duel
if I never really bicker?
You can impose exile upon yourself
in the bramble of the hollow
at coordinates no one can ever own
unwanted and outside of time
but only if you have potable water
I went there and knelt at the spot
where cold drafts spat from the ground
now all my love is proven
My Protestant ancestors inveighed
against female sexuality and the mango
I fear the technological
and the primitive equally
but side with the primitive
because I couldn’t howl without it
Half the sky is black
but lit with the light green leaves
tuned to the maple
This is a terrible oath to take
##
from Illuminated Manuscripts
*
Epictetus had no need for vulgar entertainments. Me too! I say, but when the beat’s deployed, I swarm. I emote.
**
Art is hypocrisy.
*
One mystic dreams a world without relation, singular, immutable, and eternal. Across the mountain a second mystic dreams a second such world. When they build the road through the pass, everyone is going to have to acknowledge relation, or people are going to get hurt.
**
People are always going to get hurt (e.g., electrical current over 10,000 milliamperes, enmity, broken-hearted country songs)
*
In my book of hours there’s a listing of all the liturgical feasts. I have written my yearnings: to know briefly an Absolute, and to eat an oyster po boy.
**
Each time I crave the oyster po boy, it is the first time. Only defecation allows consumption its holiness. We are confused: do we want stasis, or cataclysmic flux?
***
Both.
****
There are Marxist priests in my book of hours, obscured in the noonday racket of San Salvador. There are crusaders with scepters and rubies in their mouths that flash at night above the galloping of Araby’s white horses in the kicking sand. I hold a wounded cricket, but I don’t crush it. Everything that needs to eat will at some point find itself embroiled in both conflict and play.
*
Proverb: A chicken. On a spit. Cannot be resurrected.
*
Not one word that I have written is – strictly - useful. But I have worked to keep the lights on. And I will look at you when I tell you that I am more than just an aesthete or a cotton candied dandy.
*
Today I yearn to be, to be immersed in common water.
##
from Illuminated Manuscripts
*
The machine was designed to generate aleatory sequences, but in private hours the men who worked on it believed its missives in accordance with a profound order, something like the circulatory system of an angel.
**
And so they christened the first printing press…
*
I am not so dispassionate as to assume the elegance of any system. I am a little boy afraid that the others will read what is written on my favorite t-shirt. My heart is rotten because I was forced to write the annotated version of the phone book they mail to lonelier men, once when I needed petty cash.
***
But perhaps St. Mathematics could do better if we taught her our language. What if chaos really is beautiful, when I gather the nerve to peer over the escarpment? I think that “blood, monk, moon, hound, noun” is beautiful. (But, much like every river, it isn’t quite chaos).
*
There is far too much information at hand to express the sentiment I had intended. I am really a boy soldier marching backwards into the pimpled tea-green hills and sentimental music of the fiefdom! I have always been cartooned.
**
But perhaps I could sell you a little information?
##
return to sawbuck 4.1
##
Jack Boettcher is the author of the chapbooks The Deviants (Greying Ghost, 2009) and Surveyic Hero (horse less press, 2007). His poetry and fiction have appeared or will soon in The Denver Quarterly, The Diagram, Fence, The Hat, Indiana Review, Pleiades, and other journals. He lives in Austin and stores information at dropperbomber.blogspot.com
**
Autobiography is a Map of Ambiguous Origin, an Oath
We make some poor decisions
We buy up the shadows of clouds
and then think we own all the land
they pass over
I can’t tell
when another human being
wants to knife me
I can’t get that season back
The woman predicting my death
for a quarter at the state fair
yawned
and I ate another bite of fried pie
I couldn’t tell if “snake bit”
was a metaphor for outgunned in a duel
which is why I don’t trust metaphor
This summer I want to sleep on or wake up
on a comfortable couch
in this universe
If I awaken, I want to clutch a map
of a crooked wood
which requires no further explanation
or context, no conceit
At last the day rots leaving dusk
and if I follow a perfumed path
like the map says I’ll get dizzy
and hear beautiful music
There used to be a boys choir
a distillery forged from an old iron lung
hemmed off by poison ivy
but now there is no one, nothing
My farm is only a dream
that shows up as an error
on the hypnogram sometimes
because I can’t slaughter animals
because of postmodernism
And why would I engage in a duel
if I never really bicker?
You can impose exile upon yourself
in the bramble of the hollow
at coordinates no one can ever own
unwanted and outside of time
but only if you have potable water
I went there and knelt at the spot
where cold drafts spat from the ground
now all my love is proven
My Protestant ancestors inveighed
against female sexuality and the mango
I fear the technological
and the primitive equally
but side with the primitive
because I couldn’t howl without it
Half the sky is black
but lit with the light green leaves
tuned to the maple
This is a terrible oath to take
##
from Illuminated Manuscripts
*
Epictetus had no need for vulgar entertainments. Me too! I say, but when the beat’s deployed, I swarm. I emote.
**
Art is hypocrisy.
*
One mystic dreams a world without relation, singular, immutable, and eternal. Across the mountain a second mystic dreams a second such world. When they build the road through the pass, everyone is going to have to acknowledge relation, or people are going to get hurt.
**
People are always going to get hurt (e.g., electrical current over 10,000 milliamperes, enmity, broken-hearted country songs)
*
In my book of hours there’s a listing of all the liturgical feasts. I have written my yearnings: to know briefly an Absolute, and to eat an oyster po boy.
**
Each time I crave the oyster po boy, it is the first time. Only defecation allows consumption its holiness. We are confused: do we want stasis, or cataclysmic flux?
***
Both.
****
There are Marxist priests in my book of hours, obscured in the noonday racket of San Salvador. There are crusaders with scepters and rubies in their mouths that flash at night above the galloping of Araby’s white horses in the kicking sand. I hold a wounded cricket, but I don’t crush it. Everything that needs to eat will at some point find itself embroiled in both conflict and play.
*
Proverb: A chicken. On a spit. Cannot be resurrected.
*
Not one word that I have written is – strictly - useful. But I have worked to keep the lights on. And I will look at you when I tell you that I am more than just an aesthete or a cotton candied dandy.
*
Today I yearn to be, to be immersed in common water.
##
from Illuminated Manuscripts
*
The machine was designed to generate aleatory sequences, but in private hours the men who worked on it believed its missives in accordance with a profound order, something like the circulatory system of an angel.
**
And so they christened the first printing press…
*
I am not so dispassionate as to assume the elegance of any system. I am a little boy afraid that the others will read what is written on my favorite t-shirt. My heart is rotten because I was forced to write the annotated version of the phone book they mail to lonelier men, once when I needed petty cash.
***
But perhaps St. Mathematics could do better if we taught her our language. What if chaos really is beautiful, when I gather the nerve to peer over the escarpment? I think that “blood, monk, moon, hound, noun” is beautiful. (But, much like every river, it isn’t quite chaos).
*
There is far too much information at hand to express the sentiment I had intended. I am really a boy soldier marching backwards into the pimpled tea-green hills and sentimental music of the fiefdom! I have always been cartooned.
**
But perhaps I could sell you a little information?
##
return to sawbuck 4.1
##
Jack Boettcher is the author of the chapbooks The Deviants (Greying Ghost, 2009) and Surveyic Hero (horse less press, 2007). His poetry and fiction have appeared or will soon in The Denver Quarterly, The Diagram, Fence, The Hat, Indiana Review, Pleiades, and other journals. He lives in Austin and stores information at dropperbomber.blogspot.com
Labels: 4.1, jack boettcher, spring 2010
