POEM OF THE DAY BY CHRISTOPHER KENNEDY

Ghost in the Land of Skeletons

For Russell Edson

If not for flesh's pretty paint, we're just a bunch of skeletons, working hard to deny the fact of bones. Teeth remind me that we die. That's why I never smile, except when looking at a picture of a ghost, captured by a camera lens, in a book about the paranormal. When someone takes a picture of a spirit, it gives me hope. I admire the ones who refuse to go away. Lovers scorned and criminals burned. I love the dead little girl who plays in her yard, a spectral game of hide and seek. It's the fact they don't know they're dead that appeals to me most. Like a man once said to me, Do you ever feel like you're a ghost? Sure, I answered, every day. He laughed at that and disappeared. All I could think was he beat me to it.

-Christopher Kennedy

POEM OF THE DAY BY ERIC PANKEY

Restless Ghosts The wasp's paper nest hung all winter. Sun, angled in low and oblique, Backlit—with cold fever—the dull lantern. Emptied, the dangled nest drew him: Gray. Translucent. At times an heirloom Of glare, paper white as burning ash. Neither destination nor charm, the nest Possessed a gravity, lured him, nonetheless, And he returned to behold the useless globe Eclipse, wane and wax. He returned, A restless ghost in a house the wind owns, And the wind went right through him. -Eric Pankey

POEM OF THE DAY BY YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA

Blue Dementia

In the days when a man

would hold a swarm of words

inside his belly, nestled

against his spleen, singing.

In the days of night riders

when life tongued a reed

till blues & sorrow song

called out of the deep night:

Another man done gone.

Another man done gone.

In the days when one could lose oneself

all up inside love that way,

& then moan on the bone

till the gods cried out in someone's sleep.

Today,

already I've seen three dark-skinned men

discussing the weather with demons

& angels, gazing up at the clouds

& squinting down into iron grates

along the fast streets of luminous encounters.

I double-check my reflection in plate glass

& wonder, Am I passing another

Lucky Thompson or Marion Brown

cornered by a blue dementia,

another dark-skinned man

who woke up dreaming one morning

& then walked out of himself

dreaming? Did this one dare

to step on a crack in the sidewalk,

to turn a midnight corner & never come back

whole, or did he try to stare down a look

that shoved a blade into his heart?

I mean, I also know something

about night riders & catgut. Yeah,

honey, I know something about talking with ghosts.

-Yusef Komunyakaa

POET IN THE GRAVEYARD (WHISTLING DIXIE IN THE DARK)

So, I was wandering through the graveyard the other night
(no morbid, goth fascination, just the quickest way home from the bar)
and it was mid-July and had rained most of the day
(so you can bet your ass it was humid and sticky as hell)
and I had this goofy tune bouncing around inside my head
that I just couldn’t shake, “way down yonder in the land of cotton,
old times there, they aint forgotten. Look away, look away,
look away...” You know the one.

And the moon and the stars were nowhere to be seen.
And the locusts and the crickets had their maniacal
cartoon calliope machines cranked all the way to “eleven.”
And for some reason, I started feeling kind of edgy,
kind of prickly, kind of a “maybe something’s creepin’ up
behind me” feeling, my mind dredging up everything
from ghastly apparitions to razor-sharp switchblades.

And the going started getting a little tricky
and the leaves and tips of low-hanging tree limbs
did indeed feel like boney fingers in my hair
and I was seriously debating with some shamefully
expansive and cowardly facet of my character the idea
of turning the fuck around and taking the long way home
before some hideous manifestation of the universe’s
darker matters and energies leapt out of whatever box
it was kept in and did whatever it was that hideous
manifestations do to wayward, lonesome travelers,

WHEN SUDDENLY! (and isn’t it always “suddenly”
in situations like this?), those very same universal fates
and furies seemed to have found it fit that I find my foot
sunk knee-deep in what appeared to be a very recently filled
(very recently rained-upon) burial plot.

And the moon and the stars were still refusing to show.
And I’d swear my spook show accompaniment
of crickets and locusts came to an absolute dead stop.
And yes, I believe I very nearly soiled myself (very nearly
“filled my britches” as my Uncle Mikey used to say)
as I sprawled and struggled, there, in the oily,
mucky, mosquito-infused dark with the soil’s
seemingly supernatural suction power.

And sure, I’d like to say that’s how they found me
(the groundskeepers, the cops, the EMTs, whoever),
that I was babbling and raving wildly and had
obviously gone mad (“mad I tell you, MAD!”),
maybe even my hair gone completely white
or that I’d clawed my own eyes out at the sight
of some horrible thing that just should not be,
that something down there had grabbed my leg and pulled
and pulled (not totally dissimilar from the way
you may think I’ve been pulling yours, I’m sure),
that I’ve written this whole thing while “resting
and recuperating, indefinitely, under strict observation”
at a minimum security “mental health facility”
(in that classic Lovecraftian idiom).

But no, I eventually goddamned,
motherfuckered and son-of-a-bitched
my foot free just as it began to rain again.

And, eventually, I collected my scattered faculties
and shambled and squelched my way home
(my shoe pretty much ruined).

And all the while, that sinister and perverse
phantom pin-balling around inside my skull,

no,

flittering unseen all around me
somewhere inside those hissing sheets of rain,
tormenting me with its cloying, insipid adulation
for the Lost Confederate Cause
and the grand old antebellum south...

“Way down yonder in the land of cotton...”

-Jason Ryberg, 2011

WILL THE CIRCLE-JERK BE UNROKEN IN THE SKY LORD BY AND BY (OR GANG-BANG/ORGY PORN AS METAPHOR FOR THE MATING RITUALS OF VARIOUS AMERICAN SUB-CULTURES)

Metal,
punk,
goth,
skin,
rude boy,
rock-a-billy,
nu-jack swing,
garage
and now
“burlesque”
(I suppose).
Whatever.
It’s almost
always ten chicks
rotating their way
through ten
alpha dudes
(as per the
ritualistic observance/
biological imperative
inherent in whatever
scene-specific variation
of the whole money/
muscle/cool equation)
while another
eighty low-status
monkey boys watch
from the side-lines,
grumbling,
grousing,
gawking,
rubbing their crotches,
waiting for a shot
at the “money,”
that, in this squalid,
musky, little
coliseum
of compounded
man-pain,
will, most likely,
never
come.

-Jason Ryberg, 2011