3:AM Magazine

By Travis Jeppesen.

(from Europa, a work-in-progress)

I look cute with headphones on, but
not really. Poetics can be any-
thing, a lightning bug. It’s true,

elegance shits our way at times, but
I don’t want to wind up a Brooklyn
art whore. The world won’t explode
tonight, yr body is the only one that
speaks to my mind. Being public is ideal,

nothing changes. Rain can never be an expression
of god’s blindness.
And I can’t sit on indecision.
Don’t be an idiot, you are loving me too.
I won’t cry at being quoted.

Sands’re superficial
when they get in yr bed
I never know my voices,
they’re inside my head.
Time is ripe to change it all;
next to you on my shoulder
I’m a neanderthal.

How come loving someone is never vague –
I don’t know what I’m doing in the process.
My mind still haunts me, yr hand in my bathing suit.

The future is not a pop song, I
want the sky to fall apart –
just for one night. It’s so illegal,
how blonde they all are up there.

Day’s early brutality, waking
up on the train to final morning
perched inside of you…Eat me
existential, baby, I want some whole
wheat tacos. Oh,

love’s not worthwhile, the contrarian
inside keeps insisting. Then
again, neither is life, but most of
us go on living it – how arrogant
we all are
to be defined.

My goal is to disappear entirely this
summer. You wanna be wise, you
don’t yet have the life
to instill it in you. Sometimes

life shits on yr plate
and calls it food. Nothing to do
but go on,
a gaping hole in an acoustic guitar.
To be dead soon is withdrawal, so why
am I looking for videos of my absent lover
on Facebook – a desire for absorption
from afar – the Unknowing Glances game?

Secrets you tell me in yr sleep keep
coming back to me, I am withdrawn,
a shepherded moment. Blackhair ivory muscles,
teeth. Flowers sleep inside of themselves, don’t they,
yr bed my jail. Sometimes

I wish I had a religion, just so
I could defy it. Let that defiance
count as a definition of action,
we can’t give up on our longings.
History gave birth to modernity,
which shat out us, all
thirsty and loaded. Let me live

drunk

up & all beside you, be yr wife
and the answer to yr in-
securities, I’ll let you satiate mine.

There was a sun on that city once,
but only for a summer. And
for that time, we were all
martyred men.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Travis Jeppesen is the author of five books, including, most recently, Dicklung & Others, a collection of poetry. He lives in Berlin.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Tuesday, April 12th, 2011.