Featured Poet - Louis Bourgeois
NOONDAY DEMON
1.
You are erased.
Every day, the large birds
feed on the shore
haunting you with
a blue childhood.
2.
A picture of youth
comes back
all at once,
during fasting,
comes back.
It is the face of Lucifer,
but you are not frightened.
3.
The burned out days
of summer,
pigeons floating
by on mechanical wings.
4.
Where you are, you
can touch nothing,
the air has left you,
mute, indescribable,
the colors have
disappeared from
the landscape
where you are
staring into the sky.
5.
One must admit,
it is pleasant
to die each day,
on paper,
it is pleasant
to mark your daily death.
6.
Rooms of blue and red,
you cannot leave them,
you are the evil one,
ruling a kingdom
of yourself.
7.
An apparition of indescribable
horror walks out of the horizon,
trembling, you rush out to meet it,
you see all too well it is yourself,
merely yourself, in blue air.
8.
There aren’t any days or
nights anymore, only
the sequestering
moon, and the yellow smell
of bored and nameless demons.
9.
And if it were only silence,
you could bear it, but
it’s not even silence,
not even silence of silence.
10.
Here, presence and absence
are the same.
Here, you walk toward
yourself without end.
Not even sweet nothingness
will give you a home.
TYPICAL
I never want to eat again.
I never want to walk again.
I never want to speak again.
Give me my cave and cross
and leave me alone.
TRAIN
Rolling like a boat
and taking my mind
and taking my mind,
the end of the line is here
and I can’t accept it.
TWO WEEKS
She will not leave. The window
is not barred, the door
is not jammed. Her lover’s
gone on strike, he is
fasting. The sky
falls apart – the blue air
crumbles to the ground.
A still pond ripples
in the distance with tension.
He has caused this:
purple petals fill her ivory mouth.
NO POSSUM, NO SOP, NO TATERS
One grows tired of killing snakes, gutting lizards, crushing spiders. My furniture is full of death; there are bones in the walls. They don’t speak nearly enough. The carpet is an ocean where I am lost all the time. Outside the window, blue dust stirs in the wind. Further, the wild screams of children eat up the air.
I confuse myself sometimes with the guitar, a Tupperware bowl, the toilet and a clay jar. I pick myself off the coffee table, examining the thing that I am; a fork, a plate, a cobalt blue candle. My eyes are annihilation, my toaster tells me so. One shouldn’t eat toasters, but I have eaten mine.
The fish in the aquarium are dead and have been for a long time. I’ve watched them float for days. In the yard, the voices keep ringing in the tall grass–earth angels keep repeating a name. They are sad; time has done them in too. What are roots that never clutch? The trees are too full of spirits–they are too lucid to think about.
Down the street near the marsh industrial machines fill up the landscape. I go there and feel ageless–my arms and legs are spread out on the horizon, where the wild geese migrate in V Formation, frightening me with their large wings. All birds are people–you see yourself trapped in their faces–the thought of a cormorant can kill you.
Where I am, no one has ever existed. This world has never existed–no one has touched the green grass, no one has seen the crystal streets–machines are your only friends–all men are robots who throw off their disguises from time to time and disappear forever where nothing is everlasting: the birds are heavy in the sky–all things fill you with fear and make you sad–you hear the echo of the sky and stars haunt the blood.
ABOUT LOUIS
Louis is the Executive Director of the Mississippi non-profit arts coalition, VOX PRESS, and is the Director of the Mississippi Prison Writes Institute, a literacy agency that serves incarcerated writers and artists. He is primarily a poet, but he has published translations, fiction, memoirs, poetry, and interviews in over 300 magazines and journals and is the author of the National Book Award nominated , The Gar Diaries, and the award-winning collection of poems, OLGA. He graduated from Louisiana State University with a BA in English and was the first graduate of The University of Mississippi’s MFA program in Creative Writing.
