POEM AT FORTY FOUR

At two weeks with almost no sleep,
I am healthy and alive, moving
back into the ocean of Ohio.
In my mind, I’ve become a system
of transmissions and waste removal,
of lymph and chemicals and clouds
on the endless edge of non-dream.
I lie awake stumbling through
the weeds and glowing decades
of plastic, architecture, amnesia
and pure strategies of capture.
All of it is totally photogenic.
All of this is simply a figure.
I live alone. I live alone and it’s ok
and my voice is never only mine.
There is no money in anything I am
but there is enough and I am calm.
There is time enough and I am calm.

Last month the sun turned black
and its revealed corona poured into me.
It hollowed my heart out on the porch
of a complex I share with strangers,
children, birds, couples, lawn chairs,
sidewalks, windows, airplane, Mercury.
I am forty thousand dollars in debt–
the moon slid into place and held–
and this is my paradise of sentences.
This is how I greet the years, saying
Welcome. I have digested my own past.
There is nothing to be afraid of
ever. I am telling you this and I am
a person with the correct medicine.
I have had it filled. I have eaten it
and the afternoon does not exist.

When they write what is left to write
of the sentences I am, my wish
is to take it all down and print it
all up, and to put it out there
and know it. And you will know it.
And you will know. And you will know.
The Contest of Songs goes on.
It continues among those with names
and other terrors or joys or loves.
May they end the suffering they inflict
in their desire to become acceptable.
May they cut out the spleen of the judge.
Now I will commit myself to the years
unfolding backward into my photo.
I will eat the medicine of my future
and the writing will fantasize calm.
There is never anything to be about.
This is paradise, and it is music.
Music is paradise. And I am years.

—

from a printed pamphlet I found tucked into a copy of Interrogation Days

I’m not sure it is available for individual purchase anywhere?

—

RM Haines runs Dead Mall Press. You can find his essays, poetry,and self-printed books on Substack.