fr crow gamalinda
there was once a good word here but it is now gone. the crows have eaten my ppoem (again) im so sorryto everybody to my potential readership god the church but mostly i am sorry for myself for disappointing this great nation amerrica but even morebut mostly im so sick of these crows
what happened is mom put vidalia onion dressing at the discretion of myfather on the heirloom ron jon surf shop keychain & gave it to the crow In The backyard now we have no keychains for the housekeys less dressing but there is a crows here in the backyard still for all conceivable time & eternity =crowtime= meanwhile i step off the train this morning finding the crows have followed me from my quaint midwestern home to my new life in the garden state i think now only of the latchkey kids my future peers what did they do when crow interviened how does the family unit not dissolve in the face of great famine, diaspora, & crow i miss that keychain as if it were a part of me time passed then it was the crow of love it looked at me pupils & screeched caw fondly symbolic well people r going to keep talking until they get injured & yea yea yeah this is my lot in life so inevitable i keep losing all my chapbooks i buy because i throw them at the mean crows outside of the Hollisterr store at menlo park mall what does it mean if that this world is laden with crvows i cannot conceive of an environ which feels as limitless but it reminds me of a lot of my friend cean gamalinda my friend cean gamalinda who once wrote so beautiful a poem you were great when you moved to barcelona
You Were Great Until You Moved to Barcelona
by Cean Gamalinda
the bridge collapses me
the bridge collapses me
your knockoff boots so uncouthly bourgie, the bridge collapses me
I got no electricity, too hot to sleep in my room, the bridge collapses me
10piece chicken nuggets, medium fries and a coke, the bridge collapses me
I wonder: will it be sexy to say the bridge collapses me?
2013 and it’s sexy to me, the bridge that collapses me
no pride, no redemptive ideology, my memory’s shot, the ennui seems heavy,
the bridge collapses me
such must be the power of art, the bridge that collapses me
three men have joined me on this bench to eat their lunch
and watch the waters underpass the bridge collapsing me
and what’s a bridge but a tree of wilting thoughts collapsing me?
redundancy slips sometimes into sentimentality, that bridge collapsing me
redundancy don’t slip so well, and yet it comforts me
I just wanna pause and make a shoutout, I dunno if anybody’s heard the news
about the recent royal pregnancy
shouts out to the future Prince of Cambridge, the bridge collapses me
they say we desire contentment, the human soul inscribed in skin
I’d say that’s a bit reductive if not for the bridge collapsing me
let’s look at language materially; Oceania’s close but that ain’t me
not a poem but a song, not a song but a chant, not a chant
but a summoning: come forth, O bridge that thus collapses me
my cheek is not a resting place for the cruelty of your complaints,
the bridge collapses me
not a poem but a song chanted in the shoebox of poetry
not a song but for one whose tuning fork is the isolation of a crowded room a mockery,
that bridge that thus collapses me
“Oh c’est la vie, don’t you go and abandon me / when the bridge burns down
and the bad blood tastes like wine on the wind”
my alcoholism’s getting me down, the bridge collapses me
I prefer flan to elan, dark like rust on the bridge collapsing me
perspective was a problem for artists who are dead, their bridge collapses me
bluejay fly and die, you know it’s all the same to me / Bare ruined choirs
where late the sweet birds sang, Basedgod brrrangtang, the bridge collapses me
redundancy, I’m stuck I’m stuck in rote formality
barrier to entry I’m stuck in Western canonicity, rote redundancy, broken body
soft and racked with honey I’m stuck “The standoff began as a botched robbery”
soft barrier to entry body constitutionality & I don’t need no hook for this shit broken honey
racked with soft redundancy barrier to I don’t need no hook for this shit you me and Dupree
form invented form botched robbery rote materiality Western movie French fetishistic
increasingly racked with standoff redundancy, do I digress?
do you miss me?
do you think of me?
& I collapse the bridge
& the bridge collapses me
cean gamalinda who once yesterday told me like speaking that so equally is he in love w/ other as i am in love w/ other that he allows himself to greed a single image of the ~~ of his affection that image being her waking in t0shirt i aforementioned i have the same image of beloved pursed forever in mind like its own little hegemony, to sick two neighbors on & retreat to i cant exactlystop me as u can stop me
im trying to think about what the other great poets did when they encountered life-changing crows
what did william crowlos williams do when he saw a crow in rutherford did he throw the beer bottle at it or did he throw ezra pound back down onto the cushion of the fair moon air matt stale incomplete long poem 120north new jersey sweatshit rushing his mouth out & out like a capitalism of itself just as complicated as i remember loving to be & i said i remember what it is like as i have said before considering the...image & what does it say about contemp natl that we barely recognize sleep until it racks another i remember i hardly let myself sleep at night & thats Allison not Brainard Whitman not Wittgenstein the blood on mygums thats right thats not fun or fair at all & so just the smallest little JK emerges from the larger sycophantic tonic to strangle & emerge forlornly & whats selzer whats tonic whats ailing when what all i want is the compassion of six dollars or the bonus wavering collecting dust i really do not kno
when frank cro’hara wrote “while in the sky a feeling of intemperate fondness will excite the birds / to swoop and veer like flies crawling across absorbed limbs” did he know that so crow would be the fate of initial words ,those infelicitous & dirty like figure-grounded maps & what birds but brds what birds but crows but swans or another but the quoted words of some other another like the flighty nature offf
not him it was the grey on top of the mat that did it what does it mean that so often i want or think please be honest there is no degree of it directly i
more pressing
edgar allen poe wrote the raven but edgar allen crow writes the crow & i am not making this up it
was ultimately the better poem
what does it mean to have conflict in a non-narrative textual environment
every rule i had to break it the risk that im takin how does this translate i have no idea but it is a fleet of crows who bite the white people who love to read in verse perhaps one of these 2 parties would like to indulge mewithout not the peels but all we have is peels all we have are i am trying to figure things out upon a shifting plateWHO FUCKING LEFT ALL OF THESE PEELS IN THE KITCHENS WHO THE FUCK TOOK THE FRUIT FROM THE PEELS AND LEFT THEM IN THE KITCHEN THIS ISNT FUNNY I AM SO SICK OF YOUR BULLSHIT CASSANDRA THIS STAINS WHAT STAINS I DONT KNOW SORRY I ITS UM ITSNOT ACTUALLY THAT BAD IN HERE WAIT WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO TO THE GARBAGE CANWHERE IS THE GARBAGE CAN WHAT DO YOU MEAN WHAT GARBAGE THE GARBAGE CAN IM TALKING ABOUT THE FUCKING GARBAGE CAN IF ITS MY OWN FAULT I SHOULDNT BE YELLING AT ANYONE REALLY WHAT DAY OLD POUND CAKE IM GONNA EAT SOME MORE OF THIS OKAY IM GOING TO EAT MORE OF THIS i am trying to figure things out I AM TRYING TO
appreciation 4 my work is lost to the drifting tastes & shaky curation of time
& that is sad dont u think dont u think that that is sad
how i have 2 join emily dickinson on the party line
& some people think emily dickinson never saw a crow in her whole life but they think wrongly
or at least with a lessened sense of purpose & dignity emily who writes lovingly of crows in at least five short works for during the 1800s she wrote “fame is a fickle food” though many on the internet have misattributed this poems conception to the year 1659 or another year not the
OK dickinson’s crow has an ironic caw & many people don’t know the tru definition of irony 1659 or otherwise & “a bird came down the walk” features a bird and a crumb also “‘hope’ is the thing with feathers”
i think she did not know i saw the hope i could hope for
i tthink she need not leave the house to understand
& my luxury my personal item
when a s ong is a text is a lady is a body
i turn to a god who is worth less than the thank you i say & a line
might take us hours maybe yet if it does not seem a moment's thought last week rudy & i went to the rite aid to purchase an assignment notebook bc my life is so “in” in incompatible shambles & the check-out line was so long in comparison to the day a man walked over to where we were waiting to buy whatever & took one look at us & the check-out line & slowly & loudly the man hissed “man fuuuuck this” while slamming an object into nook of a nearby display he stormed out of the store w/ a beautiful enervated effrontery so rare i think passion amidst all the cell phones & nudity this object he was denied was 1 york peppermint patty i wish i could feel for anything as strongly as this man feels for york peppermint patty where did i go wrong somewhere along the line i lost sight of the patty
i let the patty go
Cassandra Gillig is the author of Get Out of Jail Free Card (Tarpaulin Sky, 2013) and No Association (forthcoming from Blazevox). She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Central Florida and lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with her husband, the poet Dan Machlin, and their two daughters.