Double Blind Paramaribo Revision 1

Jesse S. Mitchell

I have this post colonialist/neo-colonialist bug in my ear.  Everything I hear kind of comes in though that buzz.  Excuse me. 

 It’s the isotope Megiddo, a little burr in our cell walls, makes us the apocalyptic sort
Also gives us eyesight
usually confused for spiritual insight.
But you look up and you get a little glint in your eyes, everything is so gold and so bright.
And things get so easily blurred,  all sorts of lights and halos of light, ringlets.
And you look up
And you look up into the sky and it is like an eagle is the sun,
A big ole bird filled with avian light,
Two big wings, one for morning
And one for night.
And we mistake the dark under shadow of its passing flight
 for something other than a collections of stars and nonwaking hours
So everything is dream, nothing but dust gathered in the seams.
but
Everything is sleep.

I lived my life, one dumb animal amongst a hundred million other dumb animals. They never noticed me.

“First of all I detest all of this poetry shit, so don’t try to come at me with that. Listen, I can’t even stand to read that Byron and Shelley drivel or anything Modern either, it’s no better, a bunch of gibberish noise with a handful of filthy words, don’t ever add up to anything.  I wanted to be Dalton Trumbo.  I wanted to be Dashiell Hammett.”

But
I am regimental with my habits, every little tick, every little crumb.
But
I’m no better
No better
Better
Better
I’m no better at all.

but

I’m not that at all.  I’m a blank white sheet of paper all overgrown with ink marks and fingerprint smudges, pin lines running up the sides like creeping vines and Strangler Figs.  We’d both collapse…
I’m no better.


…forget