Un-mattering, by James Diaz

Midnight Courtyard, by George Vitorovich (USA). Contemporary.

​
Un-mattering

autumn dragged
its feet
into the night
huddled against
backbone 
and longest
road
out of this town
it isn't about need
it's about hunger
crying into the mouth of the light
flammable skin
flaking
like paint
off Bangor lighthouses
can eat our own weight
in moonlight
sharp tacky
memory 
oh eye me strange
I've danced by myself 
on the floor
with my bitters too
and it wasn't meant to be a type of kindness
the only words I knew how to use 
were the ones that no longer worked
paper - scars- too late
belonging,
belly edge of the star
this bad fit

II

I don't want the real thing
I'll settle for the imitation
the knock off
the blue thread that gives it all away

this thing was made to look like a diamond

but it's rough I want / used
a sign of a sign
not a poem or a pipe

not even a whisper

III

the river valley road
wrapped thin
in my mind
led me to water
preaching things 
about skin cancer
from sunlight
unruly year-in year-out
thunder head man
tells me I ain't walkin' right
I think about the fine dust
in my lungs
when I lifted you over the swill 
and onto dry ground

that gun smoke mountain town
when we were kids
pretending to be outlaws
pretending to be happy
the bars would fix that look in our eyes
turn it into halfway house
shame and weekly rent
lost innocence
they've taken out all the pay phones
I miss those hinged double closing doors
with lovers names and for-a-good-time-call
scratched in lazily with house keys
and pocket knives
mercy, what's gonna go next,
the check out line?
the drive thru, tilt-a-whirls
hospital bracelets?
no one told me it'd be like this 
smoky landscape
and nothin' for miles
worth remembering.

IV

bewilder me night
if all I am is particles
come alive
what of these things
that break 
on cue

I know time
is the face
love wears

how hours
bend like tattered 
flags in the wind 

sounds of the highway
and nearly imperfect things
perfecting in the distance

V

I do not know who this I
is who's talking
doing / roaming
the earth / flop houses
in a dream where
the streets all look
like inverted skies

I'll call myself we
third or fourth person
from now on

we want to touch
what we cannot touch

to grab hold of
smother dead
smaller than ozone snow
trying too hard to touch ground
grind up like a fox 
with we in its teeth

it's only poetry
it's only living with too much of ourselves
have to throw some of it overboard

I thought everything I wrote
was my way of unloading
toxic flush 
felt I had something to say
but it was all zero
in my core

a broken machine

this is how we communicate
by unraveling

by composting
souls
into young saplings
lifting mouths for rain

I really don't know what I'm made of-
not yet.

But I don't run from rustling
in the bush
I lie real still
and trust that we wear
common faces
in this house of horrors.

James Diaz

James Diaz is the founding editor of the literary arts and music journal Anti-Heroin Chic. His work has appeared most recently in HIV Here & Now, Foliate Oak, Chronogram, Psaltery & Lyre, and Cheap Pop Lit. His first book of poems, This Someone I Call Stranger, is forthcoming from Indolent Books (2017.)