{"id":1968,"date":"2003-08-10T14:46:22","date_gmt":"2003-08-10T14:46:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/three-poems-3\/"},"modified":"2007-08-10T22:18:34","modified_gmt":"2007-08-10T22:18:34","slug":"three-poems-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/three-poems-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Poems"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By Travis Jeppesen.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Mountain of Yearning<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A fine rash establishes itself on my torso. Another yellow morning to get lost in. The day will become the adventure of ants in a cage, burying their way towards oxygen. All they&#8217;ll find is a black man&#8217;s skull. I don&#8217;t want to stay official on that one. Wish our leaders made us docile. But instead, we&#8217;re merely allowed. <\/p>\n<p>Leaning toward booger venture. Plastic explosion, the newsman. Ugliest actor still has to find work. Subtle us some more, I love you. Moses deep inside. We shade the raid. He who must kick down the door. A lone rat is your honest answer. We must learn to invent sideways dimension. Smashed E on the walkway, a thin bridge leads us there. No one knows. The truth a bee sting.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Eat My Rot, Corky<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A new kind of chewing gum can satisfy<br \/>\nall tastes. It&#8217;s amazing, the stuff<br \/>\nthey come up with these days. It makes<br \/>\nme glad I&#8217;m not allergic to the sun.<br \/>\nThere are worse things, I imagine, but<br \/>\nwe&#8217;re not interested in entering them in<br \/>\nour limited vocabulary. The trees offer<br \/>\ntoo much comfort. We see the open<br \/>\nfrontier, but when we reach out to<br \/>\ntouch it, find it flat and staticy.<br \/>\nThe hair stands up on the back of our<br \/>\nnecks. Just looking doesn&#8217;t cause<br \/>\nthat. Guess you have to defamiliarize<br \/>\nyourself with something before you<br \/>\nsecond-guess it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Last Poem<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Eat logic hot dog bugger. Magic<br \/>\nstain octagon name black skulls<br \/>\npush a button. Not to &#8220;variance&#8221; the<br \/>\nshock, but to allergic psychosomatic<br \/>\nsuffusion lack time sphere demonic<br \/>\nItaly. Runty surety palm fore, knots<br \/>\nin cots also black. Transpire the<\/p>\n<p>Microphone face lawyer. Time spinner<br \/>\nblock stem. Hawks, cats knock over<br \/>\nthe hot iron steam. TV Grandma,<br \/>\neveryone&#8217;s gay in the USA. Beard<br \/>\nand toenail trimmers unite against<br \/>\nthe threat of fascism, world is<br \/>\nsaved. So we find another leader<\/p>\n<p>To pick apart like vultures in a<br \/>\nhumidifier. Who wants to be a millionaire?<br \/>\nThat guy&#8217;s tie. To personify numbers<br \/>\nis all that&#8217;s left. We cannot come<br \/>\ndown to the level that&#8217;s been forced,<br \/>\nwe are left vulnerable to hallucinated<br \/>\nexistence instead. Let&#8217;s kill gravity,<\/p>\n<p>Invent another system to defy, see-<br \/>\nthrough being will float like olives<br \/>\nin a martini, graced with the over-<br \/>\nwhelming fact of presence in all<br \/>\nits undiluted forms (if there are<br \/>\nany left.) Just to stand there<br \/>\nnaked would be enough, but we<\/p>\n<p>Have to fuck things up with the<br \/>\nwind in order to give voice to<br \/>\nall the appliances we keep around<br \/>\nus, as though they&#8217;ll protect us<br \/>\nfrom whatever invading force<br \/>\nwe&#8217;ve invented to keep us clean. It&#8217;s<br \/>\nabstract, the illusion of wildfires,<\/p>\n<p>Devouring the cities we&#8217;ve worked<br \/>\nso hard to build to destroy.<br \/>\nSkiing down a woman&#8217;s breast be-<br \/>\ncomes the last thing we can hope<br \/>\nfor, that and the ingrained desire<br \/>\nthat we&#8217;ll awaken tomorrow<br \/>\nmorning with nothing left to say.<\/p>\n<p><strong>ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/strong><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.blatt.cz\/\">Travis Jeppesen<\/a> is the author of a novel, <em>Victims<\/em> (Akashic Books, 2003), and a collection of poetry, <em>Poems I Wrote While Watching TV<\/em> (Blatt Books, 2006).  He currently divides his time between Prague and Berlin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Eat logic hot dog bugger. Magic<br \/>\nstain octagon name black skulls<br \/>\npush a button. Not to &#8220;variance&#8221; the<br \/>\nshock, but to allergic psychosomatic<br \/>\nsuffusion lack time sphere demonic<br \/>\nItaly.<\/p>\n<p>\nBy <b>Travis Jeppesen<\/b>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1968"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1968\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}