Matthew Goethe
from An Appropriate Death
1
You could have died going
into the glass restaurant
The sea fleeing inside
Into the vapor trail of one tabled turquoise clink
Baseboard bent howling
Valium beads
One little saccharine braid stays
One little saccharine blade strays
Blood owner blood owing
Blood Owen blood omen
Blood glowing
Storied corner corpses lick the walls of the room face flickering
Olfactory horoscopes lift idly
Ouroborous’s breadsticks
Clandestine
intestines digested by the outer sides of the night
Slice off the years
And no one can hear
the face of
Her song buried deep in the ground ground down
A flock of birds frozen mid-flight
under ground
A chair is leaving itself all the time
Not one arresting rib in my body
No one resting rib on my body
A promise made is a promise unkept
antlers but better than none
A letter to no one
Coastal earrings
lung
Raise
2
As we grow older
Increasingly realize the personal is an accelerant towards the exilic
This is why more and more we mention the weather
The burnt smell of coffee crushing the digits into chicken nuggets
Which are closest analogue to poems
At this point (6 years-old) e-
Specially when the fried eyes of prophecy meet barbecue’s sweet apostasy
The joyful tears begin helplessly sliding sucked into the future
To be reused
For the death of my father
The big blue veins almost breaking the skin. each hand a page in the atlas of the dead.
the nuns arms covered in abrasions, stains, bruising easily, handling
the heavy books
pulling them down.
My daughter tells me a story. It goes something like this:
The tree jumped over the building
The tree jumped higher than a wave
The tree jumped higher than a person
The tree fell into the sky
“We are constantly shedding bits of skin” you said
“Well then I am living in the constant flurries of your life and death
But it’s not life and death”
A distant house
alone in its own lights
What apologies were needed
So long as they hopelessly burned themselves into the next day’s vision
“To be without a mouth is to be without a house”
“Yes, but the mouth is the house of death”
“Then it’s good they say a house is not a home”
Poem
I home away from home
It is so much fun
I live spinning mouthless
under a new sun
-Hello Kitty
“Holes don’t have any holes in them”