Michael Martin Shea
from I’m Sorry but None of This Is My Fault
*
Lead bubbles up on the coasts and moves inland, in fulfillment of the ancient sayings. A soft cheek is preferable to a hard body. Gossamer dissolves into the water supply. A wailing well won’t go unheard. The temporality of life is annoying: years pass like robins, then like eighteen-wheelers, then like a shared glance in a wood-paneled cocktail lounge, and then again like the robins and their insolent song. Each morning I watch you undress, then dress again, and consider myself among the blessed, for observing not the shape of your person but the shadow which your transience projects upon the wall. A speckle of shit on the egg offends you. The scent of toast portends: the Years of Pain are upon us now. Haptic feedback looms on the horizon. Is this blessing divine or merely coincidental? Consider the tedium of “going to town.”
*
Okay fine, I said, I no longer care enough to fight for a more just society, I accept the dominion of just-in-time shipping. Pigeons drop from my pockets like credit card receipts. Madness liquifies our insides like an x-ray. Each morning I pull on the socks of plenty and stumble into the awning of my new realism, still chuffed from sleep. Okay fine, I said, I’ll abandon the visions of the future I have harbored like a weapon. A local prophet sojourns along the edge of the municipal driving range, scrambling up the banks of the levee like a sailor. Lumber sweats like a senator. Cetaphil looks like cum. Okay fine, I said, I’ll boof this if it’s for a good cause. Each morning I increase my TV volume as if it will deliver me from this protracted adolescence. Lyres enchant the peasantry. Lutes are the cause of underdevelopment. Okay fine, I said, I will do my part to uphold the gig economy, as I wallop my dreams like a rug. Form grants a return to a past I’d tried to escape from. Visions of the future I have harbored inside of me, like a weapon. A tropical fish discarded in a field. An unfinished list of baby names.
*
Pills stick in the throat like phlegm or hot mustard. A chastity belt buckles in the wind. You are charging into a life I wanted to imagine myself living, as if possessed of a mandate from the people or the swine. Memories bathe in the hibernaculum of their enclosure. Envy attacks the prime minister. Death bellows like wave. I want to watch a dance routine that feels like the thrill of running a red light, or to see a president die on live TV. The unborn host their séance in my basement. The city erects an oracle in the vacant lot. I’d like to order a new sense of communal belonging, or to finally fall asleep without the grace of melatonin tablets. Sitcoms circle the commodity form to perform their nightly ablutions. The fates emerge from the ethernet port. Each evening I sink into a depression which can only be forestalled by the balm of American sports programming. Grace be upon the home run derby. Grace to have a puppy in the fetid dawn.
Michael Martin Shea is the author of three chapbooks of poetry and hybrid prose: 'Soon' (Garden-Door Press), The Immanent Field (Essay Press), and Comparative Morphologies (above/ground press). His poems and translations have appeared in Colorado Review, Conjunctions, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Fence, jubilat, New England Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. He lives in Philadelphia, PA, where he is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania.