Matt D.. Dimler
The Worst of American Poetry, 2006 (Radio Edit)

I really have no thoughts that I can call my own:
I'm but a bitter slave to nicotine, ideas, and beliefs—
Which is not to say my art has a bitter tone

Or that my words can offer no reliefs
To this condition called living,
On a soulfully forsaken Earth,

In a lonely universe forever spinning
In cycles of Live, Dream, Die—Rebirth.
But no less, sit on this couch I will and wait

Until an idea comes—and contemplate.
"Poetry is an exasperation of the soul", I will
Say to myself sitting, smoking, on the sofa,

"In which reason races just beyond the window
Panes, and on the sill, a candle burns and burns
Until it goes out by the winds blowing,"

Or you even knowing about it. Cars fly
Like time to somewhere, Erics, and Jimmys
And Lee Transues tired from running, of always toting

An Atlas burden amongst them all, and I have known them all,
23 years old and I have known their fears already,
Fears like the harmonies to which sirens sing, "I am not human!

I have not been born for nothing more than to rise and fall
Like waves breaking, crashing on empty noiseless nighttime shores,
Moving in and out, and up and down, and reborn again..."

B'not me, no, I am and will hold a rock (because I do) and my place here and
Continue to outpour like a Shakespearean (Learical?) thunderstorm words
'ntil the sun comes out and bleeds its rays across calm Brigantine

morning waters soft
nibbling at the sand caked
to my feet, or (eye) I

Can no longer stand to breathe.
… … …
… … … (our history is washing away)

My country, my love, nine times I've seen Dave Matthews in your Coliseums,
Danced the Two Step in th'pouring saxophone rain, clutching
Jerry Garcia, posthumously sketched in hardly indelible pencil

On your earlier sunny streets. I listen to your Dark Star temporally
Every time I preach—I mean write. I've had beers in your corner dives,
Martinis in your casinos on your fading beaches with Jimmy Magz right

Before he went to your farm-front property prisons where
You took care of him, and he came out a bigger man.
I've served love in your Sesame towers, on your 13th floors

And on your suburban side streets—my first time
At that dead end by Danielle's, on break at work,
Listening to Phish cover The Beatles, Take these

Broken-ass wings, yeah, learn to fly. I have cried
In your bowling alley bathrooms for lack of funds,
Lost friends believing in your freedom to bear guns,

And lost lovers believing that someday I would be your groom
At a modest wedding, and would tell you that you are the one,
And you too, would believe. But I have faith. You never cease

To amaze me, America—when will you have faith in me though?
Here it is anyway, my vow: A yellow rose twisted from lined legal tablet paper,
Your wrinkled photo lying creased and mangled on the floor,

My own moments of poetry. I have nothing more.
Sonnets beneath the ivy walkway on our college campus
Espresso milkshakes with the local rich folk—

I put begonias behind your ear—those were the times,
My raza, when language was the language of love, and love spoke
No tongue in fear or trade; when we burned through books

Like Brooklyn Bridges; I can still hear mourning morning
Doves in that umbrella-shaped pear tree in the meadow
Beneath which noveled worlds transfixed themselves

Into imagined atmospheres—the scarlet petals
Matched the azure cosmos of your eyes, I remember.
Do you remember that episode of the Twilight Zone

We watched at Ethan’s apartment in Queens, clutching
Each other in the blacklight backlit ultraviolet dark
Where the world ends and the only man left breaks his glasses

And can’t see? No, we never got to see the albatross of Paris,
Or the sunflowers of Cordova, or finish reading the canon
Out loud to each other while we lay, no, stay in bed

Once again turning up the sheets and resettling the pillows beneath your head;
But we wrote romantic poetry anyway while the rain pit-pattered like war
Against the outside of the window, Mi amor, te quiero tu en la misma manera

Que La Luna les gusta La Estrellas. Ce la vie, youd say, Ce la vie—
I can’t even spell it, yet still somehow you understood me.
I have seen you from the bottom of the stairs before you have seen

Me, starting down, looking back in fear, forlorn.
Ce la vie you say, leaving me, every time. Que Será, será.
What will be, will be, my dear; will be, will be... —

I dont mean that, America—sing to me one more time
How you were with Carl Solomon in Rockland,
And pale Ramon in Key West; about the birches in Vermont;

Remember that time we danced with Degas at the Metropolitan Museum?
John Singer Sergeant reminded you of that song you liked. If only
We could have shared one more year of twelfth-month seagulls on the ferry,

Ca-cawing politely to each other in a cloud of mid-flight,
Ca-cawing politely to each other under the canopy of night,
Just as they always had. I can still hear them

Even though they are no longer to be heard—
And where is your poem now? And mine, written in red ink
On a yellow rose twisted from lined legal tablet paper,

Your wrinkled photo lying mangled on the floor,
My own moments of poetry—I can offer you no more.
The poem is an extension of the body, which is an extension

Of the mind. The doors of perception
Will be cleansed, but to what extent
To what stretches of consciousness

Are we willing to go, and
Which one, where, in what
State will we want to stay?

I am quite partial to Pennsylvania. This life
Is a poem in-itself. I have given in to this.
Have you ever been to a Laundromat at three a.m.,

Where the jockeys collect the quarters like
The whole scene was slot machines in a casino?
I have, and the people aren’t creepy, but diverse—

Not so much in ethnicity as where they come from
In the universe. The poem is not in America, but in me
And I am in you America—I have fucked you

In Saw Mill motels, stolen your chainsaws
From your backyards on bicycles; I grope your
Killington curves with a stroke of the Burton "Blunt", 2007;

It is my mountains in which I wanna live in, outside of my city:
This is my body, my mind, my poem, my room, only
The thoughts that I can think. I can think. This is my republic

And it is my divine (civic?) duty to teach. We spend about eighty-five percent
Of our lives inside of a body that is more ours than any idea in things;
This body is America, and we all careful little points in a lifelike Bouquet

De Tournesols; do you ever wonder what our dark skies look like 34 light
Years away, along the Fibonacci-phi-spiral of the Milky Way? I do,
I get a case of the wonders sometimes in the middle of the night. I find

That whenever I quit eating, I remember my dreams again,
And they're scary. I never have nice dreams, unless I'm awake,
And am I awake? Are we awake? Are we just

A dark star crashing? The music in poetry comes
From the same place as whatever nature I can take
In on my off-time, but this, this writing business,

This is serious. I’m forced to admit that I myself am,
To some extent, looking for gods in language, language of deities—
Cacophony. Sometimes I just can't think. Should I be writing poetry,

Or living in it? I already am—imagine what a quark's minute is like.
Its minute—so much happens in any city's minute—so minute,
And ours an accumulation of eons of these. This is the stuff of poetry,

And we’re living in it, in every quark's minute,
And only know what that's like b'cause we know what a quark is,
And only know that b'cause of those whose work still exists.

And do I exist? It seems obvious
That the laws of chemistry show
Matter and the soul to be reconsumed

Back into the universe. Hawking’s radiation exists, and we
Will eventually be able to retrace our steps, so our souls do
Go on forever, but only insofar as we are rematched in a mix

Much like our DNA—recently agreed on—takes chances on us;
And you know what I know? You know what the one thing I know is?
I know how to write a poem, and I know from whence it comes—

And where it goes—a poem written in red ink
On a yellow rose, tossed to the wind, in vain.
Still, I have to write it down. Will I remember it again?