Trevor Root
leonard cohen’s suzanne comes from some other man’s mouth.
pinky promise: was not intended now so vulgar, that. alas
language enacts its own
delinquently erotic desires. & we believe
firmly, unfalsifiably the poem
is no kind of place for pity-fucking. save that
shit for funerals, anxious
decked in yr sunday worst to match
the spiral rough now pulls you down from the heights
of a night’s drunken belief in the true
communion of linguistic spray. say
in truth you were just saying to say, like a good sign
meant nothing actually, as i so did when
referentially beginning the poem w/ a play on
an absent echoer of someone else’s song.
we are aghast at the presence of fucking, and at shit. both of which we so
dutifully pushed from the poem as things
not rightly could be said. there is no
transgression which does not in suspension hold
as true the core taboo against which it aggresses. this
we know & have known since we awoke, went to work
discovered anew that time exists & we are not outside it.
i am outside all good sense, going senseless
in search of a context i’m not certain exists, nor would want it.
there is a stinkbug in the room yes i said & i’m sick now of speaking to it.
‡‡
TREVOR ROOT lives in Quincy, MA. He received his MFA from Miami University of Ohio. Previous work can be found in SPAM Zine, Obsessed with Pipework, and Peace Land & Bread among other publications. His chapbook, “ecology of my immediate area,” is available through Puddles of Sky Press.
