Brooks Lampe

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The Bells

The bells have been modified
to accommodate our insatiable stomaches
like rainbows changed into machines
for sorting colors into imperishable boxes.

We can’t look inside them
without contracting the beauty of frogs
can’t approach them
unless we bring an offering of long loose hair
and transfat.

Society washes away everything
that is not progress.
What remains are waves.
We can watch them and feel something inside
faint and far back, swinging softly,
like a tiny tongue.

 

Politics

I want to take
Southern liberals
and Northern conservatives
I want to take

their hands.
History, the unfolding phantom,
is always trying to love us.

Hurry, it says,
be a chest.
Be a poem with
twenty centers

with the back of a
gorgeous baboon and the
withered punctuation marks
of black ponds.

 

November 19

What we are asking for
is a slow death.

We’ve been asking for it
since the beginning.

The earth writhes and burns
in many sunsets.

It is a cannon firing
every 24 minutes.

It is the dream of becoming
all media

full of centers—
the impossibility of modesty,

invisible pollen
of consciousness.
 

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Brooks Lampe teaches writing at the University of Delaware and runs Uut Poetry, a surrealist poetry Tumblr blog. His article on George Hitchcock and Kayak magazine is coming out later this month on Dada/Surrealism.

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Issue 1.5 Table of Contents