the color of love
I love poetry, but it’s a death cult
Of love, non stop repetitive chiming of the I
I love language but I hate the way
We use it, we use
The bad shit we do with it
Constant renegotiation of the text with its particulars
Fragmented bright phenomenal quality
To break down the face of meaning
A kind of freely burning syntax
But my syntax doesn’t repent
To clear out these blades of light and reveal a pattern
To work your life out
To black out for a week straight
To do it for the money, to use that money
To fund your life, your education
When the academy spits out a hundred bright blue scars
The color of love, a symptom of that
It makes me feel helpless when I think about it
Everything is so loaded
Viewing an aerial photograph of a forest on fire
Mediated by the blue light of the screen
So loaded with eventuality
It’s not like I want to write poems about how fucked everything is
I feel sick mostly, it’s local
To the signs, to think of what we do
To them, to each other
In the long hallway of incident, this bright unfolding
When memory becomes a hinge to violence
To coat the moment with some kind of charged gesture
A powder I snort until I get localized
By a feeling, or
It’s more like in every picture we’re all so blurry
Cuz we’re always running away from the past
When the future breaks us up
I always choose the more floral option
I find myself lit by the perpetual music of the market
Watching reality bloom on television
I fictionalize a concern
I work my brain off in thick resolution
What does tolerance mean to you, what does love
I listen to Sade’s ‘Kiss of Life’
Eighty times in a row then fall against the hard perimeter
Of a day spent fragmenting into value
But look at the sky, it’s the color of love
Everyday
So much of what good poetry does is to destabilize
A concern we all feel so haunted by
I feel haunted in the CVS, the ambient suicide light
Of desire reintegrated
To recognize that actual human flowering as a kind of love
A material consciousness through which the fabric
Of our wanting gets filtered
Brittle light falling against my brain and my hair
I light the same cigarette you do, I shake in the spring air
Bereft beneath lights I walk a feeling back on repeat
I obliterate meaning so I’m nowhere
But I don’t wanna be there
I think the project then is a kind of scraping
Of the plaque off the localized idea of what it means to be
Or a collectivized embrace of the rot
Inside the completely shredded register
Of a collective moment
To incentivize and propagandize dissent
Is probably the best thing we can do
It’s a blessing just to stand here
Adjacent to the hum of love
The feeling of love
As a kind of runoff of the total immolation inherent
In this era we glide through
Catching on things, obliquely
We’re always chasing something real
And falling backwards into the shadow of it
That’s called grace
To place the sky directly above us and bend the light back
Into something focal and true
An hour spent thoughtless like glass
Wet pavement reflecting a ragged light
Back into the faces of the ones we love
But my intentions are completely porcelain
I mean I shatter them anyway
Settling back into a kind of bright relief
As my landlord pins her eyes on the future
The law stays bright
The sky refracts back into a field of percentages
The color of love becomes
A shield of almost nothing, a transparent
Hole in the middle of consumption
Something real to rot inside of
Something totalizing to run my mind through
Not like water but like the smooth
Dewy morning halo, the drone of the sun
In the brittle shimmer hole, the corporate blur
Mediated by this thin network
Of vulnerability, the afterimage
I weave the bad light back
Into the fabric of what I’ve lost
And because I was so flattened by the idea
Of success, harshly streaming
Awkwardly holding up my private life
Knees buckling, head backlit by advertisements
I watched my fear spread out like lightning
Bright in the night, we’ll fall asleep
But we won’t dream
Fuck it, just look at the sky now
It’s the color of what love could mean
**
we are obligated to love that which destroys us
like fashion is a little death
to the senses
I want the dull violence
of something stupid
and meaningless
to plug my mind into
a stunning lack of
inspiration I want it
like rain absently tapping
on the back wall
of what braids us back
into the real
whatever life is
a constant bridging
of thresholds a sequence
of little deaths
little mirror reflecting
what writing is
an arrogance I think
the constraint of
the avant-garde
is fucking useless
a washed out
ego trip the senses rip
and nightly I return
to the room where
all light goes to die
in the poem
in disappointment
ennui, literal memory
loss, dumb light
streaming from the eyes
the industry does love
true love
self-destruction is the hum
we love to live in
the negative of
a belief isn’t
really a lack it’s
just honesty in
the singular, honey
in the air, language
braided into measure
weak conceptualism
made to look radical
enough for a buyout
I just want
to entertain you
tonight, my loves
my little nightmares
diffusing into non-descript
tokens of light
like music or a kind of
logocentric tinnitus
sublimating into drops
whatever blank timeless
and framed by all this
moonlight and reticence
really, it’s cool
to fall apart
it’s exhilarating
standing at the edge
of the night
wiping away
the day’s clotted epiphanies
and misplaced pleasure
a polyphonic series
of soft rituals
and the residue
on my hands, whatever
we need to convince
ourselves this shit
is worthwhile caught up
in the repetitive acts
of daily life
the ceremony
of quiet returns
we adjust
we ribbon out
beneath the gesture
before the mural
in reception
as it straddles
the burgeoning affect
the stylistic and the prophetic
the total occultism
of waking up
adjacent to the heart’s
mediocre symmetry
we want that
we want it matte black
and suffering
the serene blackout
of night above a field
lace covers our eyes
we go to sleep for three days
wake up renewed
that’s deathless
render it
perpendicular to the new
dreaming it’s all about
exactions, shot material
little hand like a curtain
over the mouth
that’s childhood
that’s subjectivity
split into segments love
a proximity to stars
what kind of stars
a prosody of stars
shot melody eating away
a brittle polarity
there in the song
that’s definitive
there in the heat
of the procession
the street
pulsing forward like a wave
and your head opening out
like the idea of a style
poetry isn’t a substitute
for living, I know that
but it makes things
bearable when the night looks
like a death’s head pinned
against a fucked up sky
and the present fades
into place all around us
that’s just me standing
in the middle of an era
inventing new reasons
to lean against you
and wear the absolute like
a dress, a pretty absence lit up
and streaming back
through the hyperliminal
why shouldn’t I, I want
the little deaths
the motive flung
back against a formless
total current humming
in the body brittle like
a feeling got caught
in the back of the throat
that I could sing this
an arrogance, a partial
paring away of what I was
and who I had to be
to get there, shaking always
a nexus of light
and syntax constant
ringing, constant sound
then nothing for hours
when you held me
up to the night so casually
I kind of lost all sense
of who I was and what
I was supposed to do
then the hours shot back
through the open mouth
of what I had back then
I just want you
to take it seriously, ok
tilt the idea back
and let it all drain
through the corridor
it’s so isolating
and human
to believe so utterly
in aesthetics
it’s fucked honestly
how much I care
about what you think
I mean, life is mostly
just instinct
time falling out of your head
like rain
and the light just goes
a horizon of outcomes
I’ve done a lot of bad shit
I think most institutions
are satanic, I pay a lot of money
to break myself in half
I’m into love
stimulation
of the limbic catalog
the sky fragmenting
and constantly lit up
by an ever increasing need
to fuck up my whole day
overcast sky just
locking into my head
thinking pattern
bloodless and true
it makes me kind of
feel sick watching it
turn the world in winter
light looks healthy
watching the birds
come apart so utterly
it felt like reality
or what I imagine reality
feels like when
you let it happen to you
without reservation
I’m sort of immobilized
by the way that I think
things through
the latter half of
a decade spent
oscillating in the blacked out
chamber of my own ego
spitting out sunlight
and reciprocity ascending
a gauze I bleed my way
through every day
I have no fucking clue
where this light will end up
or where the day goes
when night gets draped
over everything
like a mood or a shawl
uncompromising
brightness filtered
through a lack so lit
it replicates the moon
it’s been autumn
in my mind for like
three years now
and I’ve been blending this
idea of experience with
this idea of what the past
looks like
when you drop it
and watch the morning light
recede like it’s spiritual
and so filled with necessity
a bundle of pain receptors
like whatever
I integrate the sky
into my daily life
and pull the mask
of my face down
whenever I need some relief
in the quiet dark
I was bold
and the song was unfurling
from my head like
a ribbon of literal blood
and what does that make me
now that I’ve seen
the face of god up close
it’s exactly like I always
imagined it
fucking freaky
**
HUNTER LARSON is a poet from the Midwest pursuing an MFA in poetry at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and is the winner of the Fifth Annual Brannan Prize, selected by Vi Khi Nao. You can read his work in the Poetry Project Newsletter. He is also co-editor of the poetry journal and critical archive Little Mirror.
