Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

or, The First Three Stanzas

Your heart strings your heartstrings all up in your living-tomb

and last week will last. We could stay. (We should give him room.)

Your organs will begin to rot inside

your skin, you butterfly in progress. Bide

your time for years until you are a corpse,

a living Buddha. Dead. Forgotten. Here,

you see that you’re not getting any where.

I have a poem in my chest tonight.

I know you. You won’t act your best tonight.

•

We’re broke and we’re broken; we’re blacklight and virgin vein.

Dim lights, pills, your light spills like mist and a purging rain.

You’re shaking like a leaf, you tremble like

a trigger finger, drink pressed like a mic

against your lips, you’re always in a kiss,

you frog, you scorpion. You shouldn’t know

how many people you’re in love with, though.

I have a poem in my throat tonight

and you will let me have your coat tonight.

•

I meet her and meet her high standards or what-have-you

and so far I’m so far away from you. Not a clue.

And she’s not evil, no-one is, but still.

But still. But still, you flee to your Brazil

committing crimes just to get in, but you,

you kicked chihuahua, don’t belong in hell

or heaven, you belong right here. We tell

ourselves we’re poems, but you cannot fit

a sonnet in a koan, but still: you suck

the marrow out of life itself to fuck

your spine up, crush your bones. And if you let

it go, this poem in between my teeth,

I’ll teach you how to breathe, I’ll stand beneath

and catch you, should you fall, this ending you

can’t help. For we take turns, my friends and I

to be the one to say: today, don’t die.

I have a poem on my tongue tonight

which I have swallowed. I have sung tonight.

~

From the hidden archives. Offered up today as a prayer that I won’t have to write another one of these.