Bar Mirror
Go and sit next to a Navy SEAL
doing shots with his girlfriend
at the Applebee’s on Manchester Road
when you are full-up with despair
and become acquainted
with ignominy and humiliation
and ask yourself
if eloquence is adequate compensation
for the loss of the body
and the ruin of objective truth.
Treatment Plan
I don’t see
how anything could get done
if everybody felt this way.
You wonder why I smoke,
why I eat so much ramen.
Maybe I’ll take some Ketamine!
Oh, someday I’m going to write
a twelve-page treatise
upon the view from inside a coffin
and play around once more
with all my amiable delusions.
One time I got so very freaked out
that my feet began
to have these mysterious
unexplained aches. I would
walk from the bus stop to my shrink
and dream
of canceling all my stupid appointments.
And then I cried about my dad
and all the pain in my feet went away.
Maybe love could help me. Wait, dummy, aren’t
you supposed to be a poet? Write this on the
underpass and do your rain dance. Your
main job from here on out is to remain cool.
Phobia
I was dislocated
into the farthest reaches
of my parents’ basement.
Some druggies get so high
that they actually enjoy
what tortures a mental patient.
Life becomes a manner
of knowing when and when not
to surrender.
Then in comes Jim Morrison.
All my life I’ve tried
to apply some desperate theory
to the kid lying
stiff and prone
and listening to the people
scraping their fingernails against the door.
I hope my teachers know
how much I love them, and
how much they’ve weaved themselves
into this text I’ve made
while somewhere there’s this stuff
going on, going back and forth and
up and down that we’re not aware of.
I’m just a petty thief who’s afraid of heights.
Just a Bit of Lit Crit
Sometimes it seems to me
that the High Romantics
were a bunch of folks
who liked to complain
that things
were not as they would have them.
But deep down below everything
is a structure
that was created by God
and which doesn’t necessarily
have anything to do with
Western Binary Relations.
As for me, it was all too much—
too many wrecks,
too many people pissed off,
too many people trying to save me.
I was the subject
caught in the jargon
of the transgressive impulse.
So I had to stop living.
Since then the demons have been slowly dying.
All I have to do
is keep it cool and the resurrection
will come.
The Abrupt Theory
I used to be pretty good with language
before it got
all sublimated and repressed—
and I never knew what I wanted.
When I was walking
in the rain with Diana
and she asked if she could kiss me
I got suddenly coy
and said stay dry
and she walked away
flabbergasted and quiet.
My old man hated sudden loud noises
and a kid spilling a drink
and especially
the way I loudly slurped my coffee.
During his last years
I would walk back and forth
in the kitchen having conversations
while he had the oven open
because the boiler wasn’t working
and I had that old electric feeling
of being completely numb and exorcised
and once I called Diana
in this terrible desiccation
and she called me psycho and hung up.
Matthew Freeman's new book, Ideas of Reference at
Jesuit Hall, was recently published by Coffeetown Press. He holds an MFA from
the University of Missouri-St Louis and is known to run a workshop here and
there.