Thursday, April 6, 2017

JULIAN RANDALL - “The King Is Dead, Long Live the King”

Heaven is the certainty that you will be avenged
           I know            I know             the kingdom is not fair
but it’s what I have  a montage of red and a mitosis
           of knuckles    I’m not sure how you could expect me
to love anything       Ain’t no question
                                                sadness is regal like that
                           golden and replaceable  once I wanted
a lineage of identical men             once a mouth soft and hot
as the quickest way that gold can hurt you     You see
           a pattern yet?            I practice the want of nothing       and fail
                                           I’ve been shown how ugly I can be
when I am invisible
                                           I don’t believe in yesterdays
The throat of loneliness?              Straddled with my knife
            I press my hands to my face         and the lament is a valley
the light sags through          What do you do when you have
                      lost Everything?         Rewrite the history of Everything
I don’t like my smile             because someone told me I didn’t like it
            Now I am gorgeous in all the languages I mothered
                        Flex the antonym of Missing             I avenge myself
Stretch my hands      I orphan my grief for the living and it is beauty
                                                            ain’t no question          I monarch
the lonely       I my own everything now I miss my love and
           it is an American grief          I strike the smell from nostalgia
cut my memory to spite my country        What is the odor of nothing
           but my dominion in want of excess             I grin and pillars of                       bone flower
into sawed-off crowns           say I flex the light and the light flexes
            heat shimmer             unfurling like a bicep           my lust a                              mirage
where the body is merely a congealing of the river           I can feel it
  slowly drifting away from me     The world I knew is gone
and getting more gone           and my anthem populating my nose
           with an abundance of salt  I slip the shroud over the life I named
and forget I belonged to someone once         My sovereign’s face is a riot
of diamonds whining        This will be a beautiful death      and I am             free
and gorgeous and desperate to never have to miss anyone again
I rock the jeweled shroud           become the bride of my own sad light

No comments:

Post a Comment