Being Simply Stupid by Jefferson Hansen

               “There is no such thing as language”
                                    — Mark Wallace

Feints & shivers against
a look in your eyes
that says something nasty
or not about a
game we may or may not
be playing.

Saying, “You’re sweating
against the cold &
this place is fun” meaning
whatever the hell she
didn’t know she
meant, I guess.

Thinking about language
is a diversion from
the action between your teeth.

A tongue clacks its way against red skin and white
Lips pop against every last glistening track of attempt
Our ears can go nowhere but haywire
Sound refracts and clatters through the thickness of air

And you can only write
when sleep dogs
your periphery &
you wish against
the spring-loaded
clicks of the keyboard:

someone is watching
you someone is always
watching
you

I talk the game of my deepest forgettings hidden
somewhere in grottoes never marked beneath
mountains long lost inside ribs that
hurt to heave & still do it

I
I want to tell you something
that trips at my
latest last glistening &
I see you outside
something invisible & thorned
I can only speak the echoes
from my lost caverns—
can they clatter
and curve into what
you I think need to hear

Sound travels better in water
molecules packed so closely
banging into your chest
your eardrums

We end where we begin
in water
puckering and putrid
wailing against the drip incessant
whimpering at the erosion of
skin and scale

life gathers and sickens
but somehow, somewhere
you knew to pass the berries
for my sponge cake & 

we smile as unknowing &
dumb as the toxins we carry

nothing else matters but your
lips, your lipstick, your shy
white teeth &, for now,
I hold out for being simply stupid 

 

Jefferson Hansen is the author of the novel …and beefheart saved craig (BlazeVox) and Jazz Forms (Bluer Lion), a selected poems. He is the editor of the Internet arts journal AlteredScale.