Five Octaves

The outrageous pretense at the center of your quivering, substantial privacy


I think of it and feel free, something empty fills with warm water.


Somebody spews needy chaos all over the carpet in a hall of fame’s lobby


but all that disappears behind a glistening sheet of plastic


when I train my eye on the center of your diaphanous notions.


My man, you say, let’s eat something off the ground, let’s take the poison path


we’ll let everybody know we carry answers to certain secrets.


There once there was an ocean, we said. A couple children looked at us. 

everybody but __________ knows what I mean


the moralizing pierce of the sun on the tip of my house


the look on the face of my hero’s daughter


your peace on the edge of my nostril


A CLEAR SUBSTANCE OOZED FROM THE BUMP


goo with eyeballs going on about Ram Dass


an ill wind glitter-fucked with starlings


an oldness to this stretch of day

This one makes no sense in the future


which is Thursday; go eat a hamburger


hunt flies with a lighter


keep your eyes on the road, dude


scratch the implant they put in your neck


come, pull down thy mask, my camouflaged neighbor


go ask the distant bull-shaped cloud, phased with meaning


why thy gun droops in the street           

                  
                                               January 6, 2021

This summer touches my face oddly.


The hot gore of its afternoons


dries the blood to a powder. It’s not so wild:


every age finds an intricate suffering,


this one has thirst and particles in summer.


Some half-remembered folk melody cries out


for gallon jugs of green river wine:


tastes like grass, fucks you up, cold on the tongue

Why even talk about the sea’s death


fool’s gold and pollen shimmer in the wave


the river squeezed out of a mountain


came to rest under this smoky fuck-all.


Let’s split the roof of heaven to the very star


say something reasonable that you can agree with!


squirt my dream, some money, on an echo, sea-warped


and wooden, an accurate portrait of somebody you used to know

Jared Stanley is the author, most recently, of EARS (Nightboat Books,
2017) and Shall (Black Rock Press, 2019). Recent poems have appeared
in Bennington Review, Couplet, and Oversound, and new artwork includes
Cloud Flag Warning (Other Places Art Fair, San Pedro), La Jolla Reading
Room (with Matthew Hebert, Athenaeum Music & Art Library, La Jolla), and
A Lip Smack, Laughter, Paper Rustles (with Sameer Farooq, Woodberry
Poetry Room, Cambridge). He lives in Reno, Nevada, and teaches at the
University of Nevada, Reno.