09.11.2008

The Nearest Simile is Respiration (an excerpt from the poem by Ashley Capps)

But with you! my sweetheart hairshirt,
my syntactic gondolier, ruffian for hire, befoolable
irresolute Chanticleer: with you, I back-float
the massy and heretofore unnavigable childhood
algal blooms, where no fish swam. No fish
have swum that Mississippi.

With you, I forgive my father’s notes
to NASA, the self-inflicted swastika tattoo,
my sister’s coked-up juggernaut cannonball
into the afterlife.