five poems
by Daniel Luévano
THE SADNESS CHANNEL
The ghost of the grandfather rattles the actress awake
But can’t tell her anything
About anything.
A cousin to the jellyfish, a bright sucking flower
Feeds on little eyes of the ocean,
If eyeless itself, & can never be eaten.
In deepest, darkest, Jerkass, USA, machine guns
Quake, & teeth quake, & wide-eyed beasts &
Church pews quake, & even in Russia, human remains
Shake atop a forest floor & bleach, too late to be evidence.
One may swallow lightbulbs or daggers or sadness or the past.
One may entomb themselves
In prison ink, or pipe smoke, or bodyfat, or trash,
& many will gawk, but not their kids.
A western of VistaVision gunslingers in coppery flesh tones
& rusted-up panoramas & blood-soaked kerchiefs
Credits no real stars, but casts wan union
As Mexican goofballs & doomed
Horseback natives, no real need
For plot, or even heroes, just relentless
Skies far-flung along unending rolling scrub.
Commercials for shows about commercials.
Ads for movies about writers writing movies.
Sequels & spinoffs & remakes of TV mysteries.
Takedowns & Crusades & the work-life balance of maggots.
Documentaries about your life.
No fact-checks. No consent.
HOLOGRAPHIC POEM BEFORE EASTER
I love kosher wine, says the 14-year-old
Jamming with friends at the pricey
L.A. outdoor mall.
Red wine, she tells them, is good for the soul.
Ah, child, that's one thing
I know as well.
But what I want more to tell her,
What today absorbs me furiously
As I window-shop alone: What you see now,
These boutiques of space-age fabrics
& hedonistic patio beds, this sunshine,
These friends, these strangers, all this
Will never be known
Apart from your seeing.
That’s hard for a child.
That’s hard for me
As I jam past the garish, tantalizing
Come-ons, while my own future
Catches up with tomorrow.
It’s not my place to tell her.
It’s not my place. It’s an ignorance
Only the stars ignited can know.
All is, & people, nearly all, are weird
& lonely & many in tears. Maybe she
Could tell me that part.
But my other furious panic
Today is the reverse condition:
Existence is a hologram
Projected from the edge of all
Possibility, from a deeper universe,
Deeper by a single dimension
Not allowed us. People
& our espresso chains & our niches
For alert machines
& our life-affirming
Wall-hangs, ambitions, our ignorance
Of the stars. People who are naturally
Red-haired, nearly none, & require
More cuddles than three arms can give.
People who are matter in three
Moveable dimensions & therefore
Waves & therefore
Interference. People
Who are filaments of a creation
Gathered into stuffs like snow globes.
And projected from the outside
Of everywhere.
It’s not my place to tell her that either.
It’s not my place to remind the asshole
Barista in a newsboy cap
That his stank shower gel
Is part of my world too.
Remind the grandmother in itty
Bitty sunglasses while she shouts
Spanish into a huge cell phone
That she might just be happy to be
Part of such a story.
Sunday is Easter.
A bad day for practitioners
Mournful of their convictions.
Because it’s not the work of the Lord
To create meaning. It’s almost all
That’s been left to us,
Projected from outside time
Into the newsroom of the 21st century.
Not the work of the Lord
To make a decision,
As any particulate of existence
Contains the whole, our cellular
Bleeps & pings, swollen feet
In strappy sandals, & embraces
& odors & ideals
For company towels
Will decide our curve
In the grander form.
The Gnostics believed the world to be
Debased from all time.
Now they might say from all space.
Ask the girl who loves kosher wine
While she slums it tonight
Hanging with jerks in Reseda.
But until invited to a better party
Look at her take pleasure
In the given world.
YOU SHALL REBIRTH QUITE SOON, PAT
You shall rebirth quite soon, my friend.
You will be again
A head-down, ignorant
Fat-legged little dumpling
Bracing against contractions
That suck you at your scalp
Like a cowboy hat its cowboy.
But what must it mean to you, friend, a Buddhist,
To be a ghost, relegated as you are to haunting
Such a suburban edifice as this one
Encompassing an illicit massage parlor
& legitimate Thai take-out &
A medical dispensary & an abandoned
Weight Watchers. What must it mean to be
Ghost, until you are called again
To be a person. And you an American
Buddhist, so chances are you didn’t believe
In reincarnation, huh.
I could never be a Buddhist, pal, at least not
Until my next incarnation.
I believe in too much & usually
The rationally suspicious,
Like Ouija boards & the energetic
Laying of hands. I try not to
Believe in much, or to be sorry
For what I do believe in.
I am sorry for your current condition
& sorry to meet you now
At this time of night, at this address,
Cold sweat sucking back through my pores.
I, like many Americans, & Buddhists, & you, Pat,
Find it difficult to “Live in the moment.”
Graffiti on doomy alley brick
Shines with the big orange words
“Go Fuck Yourself” which I think
Is some asshole’s attempt at opening
A suicide note. Or maybe a Book of the Dead
Open-sourced for the people
As our full civilization births & rebirths
Little carriers of genes & viruses,
Little gasoline-dependent toy-neglectors.
O Mothers should envelop us again &
Shouts of labor across our bones
Might warm us long into this
The latest life. The next line should be
Go Birth Yourself.
It’s all too bad, Pat. These lives
That wipe clean like frayed gingham
Table liners. These lives that shake out
Like spotted sheets. Like your life
In particular, Pat. The next line should be
You shouldn’t stitch your wrists
Closed with shoelaces.
BRETHREN AROUND OLD TOWN SQUARE
Wretched & absentee dads,
Former heartbreakers,
Stagger through hashish clouds, craniums
Roaring with little noise
Out big headphones, while their brethren,
The dreadlocked & broom-skirted
Grown-up runaways
Beat on acoustic bodies & hope
For money, while aunties & uncles
& townies-slash-neighbors
Dispose with me some income
In a rattling brewpub
Then amble past barely solvent
Nepalese imports & mod kitchen
Tchotchkes & itty bitty boutiques
Of teeny weeny apparel, & tonight
The Rapture-minded pamphleteers
Slip featherlight leaflets
Heavy with heavenly clouds
Palm to occasional palm.
What a congregation, what misfortunates.
I, like those others, wander decades
In what is technically a steppe, seeking
A chip of blameless flat chaff
That balances easily on the tongue
Like the low full moon.
A couple of middle school girls
Slouch together burbling with laughter
At our lame figments of adulthood
& push off each other, shy & grinning.
Tiny loosed little tots huck
Their shoeless selves at inground fountain waters
& retreat hysterical to their crouching grownups.
An outreaching advocate jots in her margins
An elapsed personal history. Renames
Bums, derelicts, campers, & pilgrims.
An inveterate unhoused
Practiced in pretending to wait
Asks a good thing of anyone, nothing.
No one knows anyone, but our pasts
Follow us like detectives
& we can’t turn around fast enough.
What a congregation.
What plausible raison d'êtres.
Yes, everyone is rich-rich-rich
& owns nothing really at all.
All sit in some shape of sullen poverty
Tangible or figurative
With all the world within their steps.
A boxy Mexican lady offers
An envelope to a wadded ski jacket
& is met with bloody lips.
What to offer. From enormous pockets
A charity so penniless
Who could steady hands long enough to give it.
HILARIOUS BUDDHISTS
You’re an American looking for the one true religion.
Don’t get too excited. My pastor, my psychiatrist,
My priestess, my bamboo shoots
Tossed in earthy desert powder
Tell me nearly when I listen the same:
Don’t get too down on yourself. I myself
Am more religious than spiritual.
I, I mean me, like the little atheist
Schoolgirl with her round little atheist eyeglasses
Skim through whole chunks of the Library of Congress.
Well, she reads, I skim
Scanning for clues in misread lines
& in the peripheral leering of grownup men.
Feel her emptiness of body, feel her
Openendedness of cranium.
Even she, even her parents,
Hold out for a single truth.
And let me tell you, it’s there:
Just behind your heady crown, just opposite
Your eyes, right there, inside-out
Of your hearing, inverted on your tongue
& also perched on the bridge of your nose.
Keep twisting. Religion is dying.
And that that makes the great
Religions great—dying.
Magic & crystalline knowledge.
Which is not to say The Truth is dying.
Real Truth outlives us & kindly will
Take us along.
O my lapsed sons & daughters of Abraham:
Observant, areligious, somewhat
Orthodox, pretty much devout,
You fear devotion is nutso
But you love many among the insane.
You love yourself.
You are a logical thinker, a sentimental
Drinker, an intuitive tinkerer.
So, my seeker, when choosing a religion, skip
Ones that tell you what to laugh at.
What you’re laughing at.
It’s the same reason you’ve never met
A hilarious Buddhist: once you let go the fear
& the sick attachments
That got you this far, you’re left
With purity & where did first
Purity get you, but fearful & sick of yourself.
But, should you one day meet said hysterical Buddhist,
Follow that one. Follow so close as to lean
From the next barstool. But keep in mind
That winking yogis love most
That they know they know
Absolutely less than you.
Photo of Daniel Luévano
BIO: Daniel Luévano’s poems have appeared in journals including Interim and Rust + Moth, and in the chapbook The Future Called Something O'Clock. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.