SEX
BOAT
My open hands are
innards.
The one I hold toward
you
masks a whole castle
whose gate/gatehouse
makes one evil.
It makes our questions
perfect.
Like a gift, it ruins
us
gradually from inside.
Our true fate was
dodged.
Our fake fate was
dodged.
What could be left to
us?
It’s never too late
to throw up.
Portland, Oregon poet James Gendron’s first trade poetry collection, Sexual Boat (Sex Boats) (Octopus Books, 2013), is constructed out
of six sections of sassiness, sketchbook pieces, letters and sly talk in the
form of short lyric poems. To be precise: five sections of short lyric poems,
and one section, the fourth, made up of a sequence of lyric bursts. These are
love poems caught up in longing, lust and sheer loneliness, aware of what has already been lost and just what else might be. Gendron’s pieces are composed nearly
as train-of-thought explorations in lyric form. As he writes to open the fourth
section, “IDEA”: “There are no ideas in death, just pain. It even hurts to take
off my pants.” Whither the poem, James Gendron, for a poet who occasionally seems
very pleased with the sound of his own voice. Very much in the vein of youth
and the beginnings of real experience, these poems rattle and rail, clamour and
clang about thoughtfully against the excess, embracing both light and the slow,
steady dark.
WASTING
MY LIFE
Wasting my life in the
gleaming snow
aka cocaine. Did you
realize the human body
has got over seven
miles of braided thoughts?
Under this girdle of
fat I’m wasting away,
in a sweater, eating
from a bucket.
In fat I see myself
distilled
more honestly than in
my face.
It stuffs me full of
non-predestined life.
Pain: where do you come
from?
I feel you, because I’m
emotional. And I feel you
again, because I’m
remotional.
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