Watch short video clip from the Longview poetry reading. Someone in the audience was kind enough to film this on his iPhone and upload to YouTube.
Wisdom from a Madman
Do you have any shards of sense for me
From the root of a crooked tree?
My mind swirls like an oil slick
In multicolored toxic beauty.
Can you give a hand to a berating prisoner
Twisted in concrete left turns
Staring at divots in a wall
That are a perfect fit
for the forehead?
I hate the rides of the caramel colored day
I hate the friends of friends
And the friends themselves
Who would debate a cloud’s claims
On gravity down to the dust on a flicked rock.
Can you buy a drink of Gasoline?
To burn my thoughts in a bonfire
And send them rising like drugged fireflies
Weaving off a cliff.
I try vainly to clasp the wasted hours
Like bouncing marbles
The molecules in a maladroit system
Running in little rivers
Over my scalp.
Four score and seventy knots
Of a heedless headwind
Strips the bark off the light
In late afternoon.
So, mix you doctors, give me your pills
To swill and I will confound your formulas
There are neither
Emollients for this rage
Nor doors to this cage.
Joshua Kight 5/18 /09