Two Poems

 

by Corey Wakeling

 

 

 

 

If they were to undress in our company

 

 

the universities would smuggle pigeons

in their pigeon holes, and the automatic doors

of faulty codes would simmer under

red light.  Marvellous certitude this: he lay

right down beside her with a hand in her

hair making pinching motions.  Not to

be expressed emphatically in the company of

enthusiasts.  Carnations and desert roses are

the secret.  Your mother calls to see if you’re

okay, I say I think so.  Satchel-and-all did

she just about leave us, but the anachrony between

the portentous and the drunk jogger must be

seen as the soft pinching motion on the base of

the head of our dinner.  That’s

all I wanted to say of the bicameral instance of

us rushing to our girls.  That is all, sleepy priest.

That is all, devoted scholar.  The whorehouse

is deserted this hour.  The mail is retrieved;

scattered.  There is something upsetting in your

fortune to do with the incorrect usage of the

semicolon.  For your ponderous eyes — by that I

mean the interrogative mode of the tracker set on

the evidence of visitors to your house, that the

walls are not mere walls, that carnations and desert

roses scatter like mail — to the vault, I say.

 

 

 

 

America

 

 

I am more and more

convinced that Americans

are morbid.  Of their acquaintance,

I convince more Americans that I am more

and more repulsed.  They like this about me.

I like that they like this about me.

But where am I to put this repulsion

Itō Hiromi calls ‘maltreatment’?

Ten great families fill these lands.

We are all second cousins, that is, somewhat

fascinated by each other’s biographies.

Swimming in each other’s quick sand, or ooze.

There aren’t even any bodies yet.

Something about today reminds me of WWI poetry.

I would like to name WWI poetry:

“The Seriousness of Defenestration’s Corpse.”

America is regaining their WWI in poetry and who am I

to say, “the bodies are heaping up”?  Moreover,

of a seriousness and cases of posttraumatic

stress disorder (PTSD)?  To prove with yeast, we have today.

I do not even have the right camera to take something down.

Luckless, I want everyone to be waiting for me when I arrive
      home.

Home is my mother, and my mother is America.

I want America to be waiting for me when

I arrive, Mum.  I want Mum to be waiting for

me when I arrive in America.  There is a Daily

Show stress disorder where everyone is laughing,

but all that one can glean of the subject

is a Cadillac purchased from overseas sprayed

with anonymous body parts.  Stephen Colbert

is murdering a dead president wearing a mask

at a luncheon with the current president.

Will I ever get this article about the frontline skirmishes

of this recuperation of WWI done?  I keep getting

stuck on the soldiers as I saw them myself!  Crack shot

reserves taking out too many friendlies, photographing

the bodies, sending poems home to their wives and

lovers.  This is nothing like Lubang in the Phillipines.

These Americans are the opposite.  They as yet do not

know, however persistent they are, when it is the war starts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New work by Corey Wakeling appears in Overland, Cordite, Shampoo, foam:e, Famous Reporter and The Geek Mook.  He lives in Melbourne, Australia.