M i c h a e l M a r t i n S h e a —

from To Hell With Good Intentions

*

To be put in a pharmaceutical mood

strange affects induced by dying moss

and real death amid these quiet creatures

the heaven of the lesser gods persisting

some rubble blocks the sidewalk’s wander

I’m waiting for the conversation to happen

around me the way history does

bizarre animal perplexing with its noises

I’m 33 I get high for medicinal reasons

Sound of saw comes, I abandon the good

*

Curds in coffee linger

like the interminable need for friends

or our parents in their heaven of polymers

ensconced in the strictures of capital

opaque the way the ocean is

in the North Atlantic, and elsewhere too I guess?

I can no longer see it, the surface

of the knowable world like a map

stuck in the glovebox of a car

now compacted, whose roads are gone.

And whose roads are these, unpaved,

and so desirous of it—

balls of prophecy in the nutsack of the real?

I make the cursor move inside my mind.

*

Caught cotton-mouthed by pilfered pills,

it was the balloons we sought

or their explanation, in the early days

of yes and no, but mostly no,

gunfire we sought, a bracing fear

in the tepid formalism of the urban

from which a spire protrudes—

not impolitely, not not a vision.

What possessed me to breathe

from someone else’s airways?

The exchange of gas like a conversation,

balloons the work of a woman

now out of work because we refused

to conceive of her motions,

their importance to the social,

a pop of cyclonic blue amid

the drab dresses of the rowhomes,

the removal of which we sought,

latex now littering someone else’s meadow.

Human sex is not impossible.

*

A roughness hewn to belief in cities functions

under the auspices of a suspicious sun,

which will not wait for us to walk back

our claim upon the other. You dig in, asking

the many particulars their names. People see

my life changing, a town square suffers the weight

of desire, glass noodles fill a warming room.

And the cheap paper we’d print our fliers on,

marvelous hues stark against the tiredness of wine.

Of the window, you told me once you believed

it saved you, and I was jealous. The people

that we walk through on our way to where

we’re going, what they think they’re here for,

is it real to us?—rough year unfolding

as if we had been wrapped inside

a large and unambiguous present.

I have been careless with my memories.

Decades pass above us as the clouds would have