By Dan Hoopes.
untitled
I bought a pack and burned it
woke up broke & earned it
I guess it’s inevitable that things
will never be as before, reality
do I second guess you? can I?
sometimes Easton Ave looks like
a tunnel, or a runway, my
breath the airy commerce btw
Pizza City and the vengeful hand of
Jehovah, like trying to find the
difference btw the puke splattered
sidewalk and a burst of wild
tiger-lilies
I wish the power lines really did hum,
the remnant fields rolling like
fractured stormy seas, I wish
I were incarnate most of the time,
milk-crates, ball courts, I hang
heavy on the bush like late-summer
tomatoes
you say that you know me
isn’t this unfathomable, like
the outer reaches of some temporal galaxy
do you see my sputtering stars?
purgatory
I want to attempt hallucinations
so I stare at my hand in the air over my face
until I wind up bored and forget what I ever wanted
how I feel about you is a terrible thing to know
the warm air, when you want to chase the rain
in the middle of a slow paved street with quiet
houses like so many teeth, erupting like the stars
out of the spaces between trees, and
I want to lay in the street and look up there
but I probably won’t
on stumbling over some indescribable emotion
Lisbon sank down like a dream
every empty can is an act of god
brushing away light from the curtains
imagining waves to Guadalquivir
some forty thousand suddenly
a thought in a cold hotel room
I taste cigarettes, whiskey sour
the wedding caved in like a memory
in the best of all possible worlds
colossus
this nights not worth the talk
an empanada, or a worry,
two cigarettes or a cavalcade of refills for my
time-defying coffee,
you’re on empty at the stoplights (your dreams)
that stand like a colossus at the harbor, or maybe
like the egg of Columbus, or
your delicate inability to make a point
and seem authentic in your excitement
finally I’ve met Zionists
and swingset types, sheesha smoke
like nebulae, or a swirl of half and half
diluting in my eternal bitterness,
that is,
I’ve seen the avenue long-boarded,
shame-walked, and thought
that still, the gods defy us
and you too, with that Rhodes in your heart
not all things can be astride, and conquer
simply with steps, and bronze, and slowly
cast ambition, the ground
like running buffalo off a cliff
rumbles under the inevitable destiny that
you somehow control and don’t and all of
a sudden it’s 1964 and you never thought
old Harpo would die or at least
there would be no sound
when he did it
beginning
seagulls float on the morning
the garbage trucks tremble down
New Brunswick’s tight streets
and every day I destroy myself
more often watching sparrows
disappear the distance
from the curb to the swaying power lines,
just like that, in one swift rise
dogs bark down central
power lines wade into the
distant noise
fragile, like a mindset,
or an afternoon that shrinks down
to night
gone
you are unreachable like a high score,
or mount Everest 100 years ago, maybe
less out of reach than dreams
a phantom limb,
the last, unopened beer
the upper east side
or the moon, soho or shanghai,
you are unimaginable
I noticed, when you’re not around
the way the moments echo
I am scared that you
and the you in my head
will be going their separate ways
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Hoopes was born in 1988 and occasionally writes satire for The Medium at Rutgers. He plans on moving to New York this summer.
