| | | For Crying Out Loud
And I understand well now, it is beautiful
to be dumb: my tyrannical inclinations, my love
for the prodigal jocks aging from primetime
to pastime, the pixilated plain people and colored folk
with homemade signs. Cutouts, cutups, ambushes,
bushwackers. The clouds are overwhelmed
and vainglorious. MC Mnemosyne showed up
around midnight like the undetectable dew
weighing the leaves, and I was like Awww shit.
Why ain't I dead yet
like the man who wanted to be buried
with the multi-million dollar Van Gogh he bought?
(Members of The Arts League said No
because there was culture to be made into money.)
The volant statues of the aviary, the jabber-jawed
cable channels and the book in which nothing is written
but the words everyone uses to identify things
that can't be identified. Not that I ain't spent
the last ten years of my life refining my inner cyborg.
Interview questions included how did the DJ break his hands,
who's gone bury the morticians who bury the dead,
And what to do about the sublime and awful music
of grade school marching bands?
Not that Neanderthals have a sense of the existential.
Me and my forty-leventh cousins lolling, and LOL-ing
like chthonic chronic smoke, like high-water suit pants
and extreme quiet. Everybody clap ya hands.
Like fit girls in fitted outfits, misfits who don't cry enough,
who definitely don't sob, but keep showing up sighing.
Everyone loves to identify things that have not been identified.
The rabbit hole, where ever I find it, symbolizes solitude.
So that's exciting. And an argument can be made
on behalf of athletes, rap stars, and various other brothers
who refuse (click here for the entire video)
to wear shirts in public when one considers the beauty
of a black torso. If and when the dashiki is fashionable
again I will sport it with the aplomb of a peacock plume.
For now, I have a row of coin-sized buttons tattooed
down my chest so it looks like I mean business
when I'm naked. I know that means a lot to you. Copyright © 2013 by Terrance Hayes. Used with permission of the author. |
About This Poem "1. I was chasing velocity and collage here. A poem rolling down a hillside--a poem gathering steam and discursiveness as it angles down a hillside.
2. My usual tendency would be to hammer at much of what appears in 'For Crying Out Loud' until it takes on a recognizable shape. My usual tendencies are rooted in the belief that 'figurative language' (that is to say 'poetry') is the language of figures: shapes, patterns. Here I wanted to let the figure blur, fracture as it moved.
3. I hope it 'means' something to you (something with an elegiac scent) without having to simply, neatly be 'about' anything.
4. It's a test of the personal emergency broadcast system." --Terrance Hayes |
| Most Recent Book by Hayes 
(Penguin Books, 2010) |
| | | |  Terrance Hayes is the author of Lighthead (Penguin Books, 2010), which won the National Book Award. He is professor of creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. |
| Related Poems by Will Alexander by Stacy Gnall by Lucille Clifton |
| Poem-A-Day Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-A-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Browse the |
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