Places that have become me | Bob Hicok

Poor starling in the B concourse of Logan Airport. You do not
have a laptop. You do not have a cell phone. You do not
have the sky. You have an Au Bon Pain. You have a seafood restaurant
that sells live lobsters to travelers. What a fancy lobster
that would be, who flies first-class to Dallas. While you peck
at the carpet as if it’s grass, I want to sneak up on you
so softly you believe I’ve always been there, that I am a tree
and chaperone you as a tree to Flight 1872 bound for Charlotte,
so you can fly down the B-10 causeway and show the Airbus
how grace is done. Speaking of things out of place, half

an hour away, if you ignore the speed limit, there’s a boat
hanging from the ceiling of the chapel at Babson College.
In this case, I don’t want to set the boat free; it’s an emotion
in the half glass, half wood, fully beautiful room
people go to speak to God in a circle of chairs, a boat
with recessed lighting, a boat with only the waters
of raised voices to sail upon, a boat that would look good
with a starling at its tiller. I said emotion, but it’s more
of a sense that heaven has room for our stuff, our boats
and windows, our eyes and the snow I wish had fallen
outside the chapel, in which the immediate sky

is a sky of rescue, a sky of gather two of every creature
that walks or gets lost in Logan Airport and bear them
to a time when trouble is over—this is the Bible
as it is written by this poem. Every large airport
I’ve been to has had birds in it; only one chapel
I’ve been to has had a boat in it: this means
our airports are more frequently imaginative
than our worship, and more accidentally cruel. I’m home
now, where starlings and boats are where they belong; I’m the one
out of place if you ask the river, the cows, the coyotes
who come at night, gather their voices into a hoop
and lament, it seems to me, nothing.

Endangered Species | Bob Hicok

Very busy sensing there’s nothing down the train tracks except remembering there are only five remaining speakers of Mohave. There might be a loose and rusted spike, a smashed bottle of Bud is likely if I walk long enough into picturing a basketball team of old men and women in a gym in Oklahoma bouncing an orange ball against a team made up of how the rest of the world can’t understand them. Coal trains come through here, taking across the mountains what we’ve taken from the mountains, I think this is like walking over cows while eating a burger, and feel filled up on the empty feeling night is good at bringing to me like flowers before a date. Here, night says, I brought you this bouquet of gone, and it occurs to me these are the flowers of negation the man who spent a night in a foxhole with a dead Viet Cong was handed over and over. He doesn’t talk about that, there’s not a single speaker I know of the language called “this is what it’s like to dig a hole and be alive in your death with the example of what that looks like.” Nor am I the last speaker of the language called “I will too often use crows to express my deepest self,” which it turns out is only centimeters below the surface, now that we’re trying to go metric. The gravel sounds like breakfast cereal eaten straight from the box. If night is crows touching wings somehow in place, stars their eyes and the moon a hole in the patient of crows to obliterate, only the air, with its high absorption rate for dead languages, could speak of this to the past, which I’ve been trying my whole life to get in touch with. So the last speaker of Mohave will soon be sitting on the edge of her bed, noticing for the last time the beauty of cups, the entirety of their existence the honor of holding and giving over, emptying fullness into the empty mouth, and she will whisper a word the cup has heard many times over, and when she’s dead, someone will take the cup away without putting it to their ear to listen to the last, the entire ocean of what is left of a people. They will be gone, the cup taken to a new life full of waiting for water to come. I understand that sensation most of all, feeling there should be something inside me there’s not a word for in English or Urdu or Wichita. In grunt, perhaps, in the language I’ve called “heat this blade upon the stove and press it against your forearm,” absolutely. If languages have to die, kill that one. Every time I walk it down these tracks and leave it, it drags its way back and kisses the neck of my sleep with its teeth.

Bars Poetica | Bob Hicok

This is the story I’ve tried to tell. Guy 
exists. Father mother sister brother. 
Oh pretty stars, oh bastard moon 
I see you watching me. The trembling 
years leading to sex, the trembling sex. 
Death as garnish. Death as male lead, 
female lead, death as a cast 
of thousands. God in, on, as, with, 
to, around, because who knows 
because. All the while feeling air’s 
a quilt of tongues, that spaces 
between words are more articulate 
than words. It’s not like you’d hope, 
that anyone can make sense. 
Look around you, let your ears 
breathe deep — almost no one does. 
Have another drink. When they throw us out 
there’s a place down the street 
that never closes, after that 
we’ll climb a fire escape and praise 
the genealogy of light. The Big Bang 
sounds like what it was, the fucking 
that got everything under way. 
That love was there from the start 
is all I’ve been trying to say.

The New Math | Bob Hicok

There are these notions of how the world would be better. Shoot all the anti-Semites. Wear only red socks. Hunt truth like the wolf hunts elk, in packs, with relentless teeth. Make language stand up and be something like a house, give it the force of wind, the courage of a storm to destroy itself. What we think of as wild I think of as honest. Doing, not what you think, but what you are. The difference between counting the rings of a tree and finding a place in the sky. A theory toward wolf would be a fine addition to the history of advice. Train the spine to walk on fours. Claim only that which your urine can touch. Find faith in the scent of things. Humans are metaphors. Chagall was a synagogue dreaming of being a man. When his paintings meet, they lick each other like wolves. I go nowhere without alienation, I carry it like a pouch of anvils, not belonging is the way I belong. This brings us to the strange math of our heads, the impossibility of dividing by zero. If we could solve that equation, we’d be happy. I give you pencil, I give you paper, I wish you luck. Wolf would make a better denominator. Divide any number by wolf, you get wolf.

Absence Makes the Heart. That’s It: Absence Makes the Heart | Bob Hicok

Waving hello versus waving goodbye
is an interpretative act. We could make it
directional: from left to right is hello,
right to left, goodbye. The buoy

clanged all night so my sleep
would know where to go. I could pray.
Tambourine myself to death.
Electroshock the worms. Wrap the maple
in tinfoil and decry the lightning
that splits it as misguided and deceived.
Nothing I do will bring you back. So this

is freedom: being ineffectual. Here
is where spiders set up shop
during the night, here is where a crow
decided to perch. Then it gets up
and perches over there, beside
where another crow perched last week.
It would be peaceful to be a sail

except during the storm.
During the storm, I would like to be
the storm. If you’re the storm,
there’s nothing frightening
about the storm except when it stops,
then you’re dead and the maps
are drowned. Within my heart

is another heart, within that heart,
a man at war writes home:
this is like digging a hole in the rain.

A Night Out | Bob Hicok

I told the waiter there was schmutz
on my machete. He informed me
I wasn’t sitting in the Yiddish section.
Being bilingual, I told the waiter
there was gunk on my machete. Oh, he apologized
then and brought me straight away
a new machete, with which I sliced
the brisket as if clearing a path
through a forest to a temple in a life
more glamorous than the four dollars
and thirty-two cents in my pocket
with which I couldn’t possibly pay
what I owe Jean-Paul Sartre for writing
“No Exit,” since walking out on that play
introduced me as if for the first time
to the moon. Try feeling crushed
by the void of existence while staring
at a waxing moon with or without
a full stomach before or after
cleaning your machete on your sleeve.
Yes, that’s a dare, a double-dog dare,
to talk as kids used to talk in a time
of innocence that certainly never existed.

Truth About Love | Bob Hicok

I apologize for not being Gandhi or Tom
           the mailman who is always kind.

He makes his way every day no matter
           the mood of the sky with our words

in a sack and Gandhi made the English
           give India back without

taking a gun for a wife. My contribution
           to the common good is playing

with the alphabet in a little room
           while the world goes foraging

for food. I'm a better poet than man
           and it's well known how little

my verbs are worth. I am my only subject,
           being the god of my horizons.

What saves me is that just beyond my skin
           the world of yours is where

I'd rather live. The AMA says you've added
           seven point six years to my life.

In a phrase, love is a transfer of wealth.
           This is why Adam Smith gave up

romantic verse. In trying to say what can't 
           be said I'll take the Dragnet

approach. Just the facts. I'd be dead
           sooner without you, you'll die faster

for being a Mrs., raw deal can't be more
           clearly defined. To make amends

I offer ten percent more kisses each year.
           Or do I do more harm the closer

we become? If yes, leaving would be love
           and a better man might. But my thrills

are selfishly domestic. I like sweeping words
           into piles and whispering good night.

After the dream that she and I
killed someone and were in jail, handcuffed
to retribution, not allowed to touch
thigh to thigh, three new trees on my walk
I have decided to mentor: stand up, breathe
through your stomas, accept that hawks
will dismantle pigeons
in the heart of you. Or they have taken me

into their care with the advice
that I grow something green
from my head. Either way,
these reachings for sky
arrived to my notice at a time
when I was vulnerable
to cheerleading, their simple push
to exist counteracting the growing
popularity of landfills
as fuck-buddies. You see my point: optimism,
when dressed in Cuddle Duds,
deserves to be whipped. But here, where a shoot

cracked shale, you could build a church
and still do a fine business
as an atheist, The Church of Dude, Do You Believe That?
One of those dreams I thought
was real, one of those instances of life
I thought was telling me to grow up
and ride this sucker bare-back. To think
that I’d ever ask to lead the parade.
The all cello band. Miles of clowns
with their faces painted on their faces. Jugglers
who drop as much as they hold
but keep at it, their knives on fire, their fire
on fire.

Bob Hicok, “Two-Thirds of an Oath”

Hello, you. This is a scrambled mashup of whatever catches me at the moment. The intended purpose of hoarding these odds & ends is to enliven, amuse, jolt, intrigue, & otherwise move myself-- & anyone who may be passing through.

Also, I write here: dirty laundry, & maintain a sex & sexuality-themed blog here: debaucherie. Come visit!