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Jeff Lockwood USA untitled "with someone like you" the page colored with crayons it was 12 years of atrophy (anyone would agree) but I wake up now in a Stalin-era flat with a strange woman next to me sick to my stomach and wary words are hard to come by even harder than money "a malodorous din" that doesn't make sense but I defend it all by following devotion (I'll call it willful sacrifice or even martyrdom if it'll dupe my way into favor here) best leave me buried in these shelves of books ones I'll never read or on the big lake I don't know maybe some place cold some place a little quieter nikolayiv quiet wind from eastern steppes with it comes the smell of summer in springtime you sing my dark eyes frighten you (and now it cannot be) but i must go anyway to walk among temples muse new seasons and leave your stoic face to kirovograd in late june there is something familiar in this landscape of flatlands its scrub and fields of grain of sunflowers and cottonwoods line roadways creek beds the fence lines towns in small river valleys sweaty women with farmer tans cumulous clouds building congesting rain "we do need the rain" (words without meaning here) do they remind me of other places or other bus rides or maybe it's the solace of emptiness the steppe scorned for its isolation simplicity poverty like a home once mine maybe it's north dakota
Copyright,
Jeff Lockwood. |