Jay Sizemore was born blue, raised by wolves, and learned to write by translating howls. He doesn't regret his wisdom teeth. He thanks you for your concern and hopes you enjoy his words dipped in ink. His work can be found here or there, mostly there. Find him at jaysizemore.com, or, if you're a stalker, in Nashville, TN, where he may or may not really exist. A Brexit, a brack zit, a brown-yellow Brit shit Britain oh Britain, brash and brazen, bracting like your borders are brawless and broly, your broken brontract is bankrupting the branet. Brainless oh brainless Britain! Brewing brouhaha and baking broughnuts for breakfast. Bragging of brides of English brescent, brooding and bereft, a broad braxation of brejudice. Britain takes an owl’s beak and breaks it. Britain brandishes bratwursts like bayonets. Britain oh Britain, again a bargain of brandy, broomed under the brothel door, a brush up a dust up, feel your breasts up, sex text your ex and Brexit. Zoloft Could I be happy? A cat in a square of sun on the hardwood floor. Could I learn to play guitar again just for the sake of music making my body a tuning fork struck against the light? The medication isn’t working. The world tears at me like briars along a wooded path at night, and the future is a maniac close behind, his chainsaw sputtering smoke and noise. Could I learn to be myself? Turn off the notifications causing phantom vibrations in my side. Turn off the addiction to voices in the ether shaping the swirling reflection I find cupped in my hands. Could I learn to love the silence? These words are the planks I weave into my splintery raft, and soon I set sail across a sea whose other side has only been seen in dreams. Don’t follow me. A classic literary life in three stanzas When he walked out of the bedroom in a diaper and his grandfather’s boots, everyone laughed, leathers riding past his mid-thigh, he staggered like some tiny Frankenstein, so they gave him a bolt of lightning and told him to change the world. When they pulled those boots off him, he’d nearly outgrown them, his crib now a Pequod listing among the waves, his lightning now a lifeline, he wrestled the future like a fisherman, hook set in the fin of a whale, trying to put a condom on inside out, trying to tame the butterflies for pets that grew inside his chest, his heart sealed tighter than a mason jar the colors faded from their wings like that smile between her legs, where even fairies couldn’t clap back to life, their still bodies made him a man so afraid to die he wrote himself letters, placed them in wine bottles, hurled them out the window into the belly of that whale he once considered his enemy. Strawberry moon They couldn’t wash the blood from the moon, night of the summer solstice, night of grim-set mouths, hands plunged deep in silk-lined pockets, restless and rageless. The camera phones lit faces in their windows wanting to Instagram the memory they wouldn’t have tomorrow, full moon dipped in transmission fluid, globe luxation of the god damned God. Fifty-two senators awe-shucks-ing their way to another list of names fed through America’s lotto machine of human teeth and brass shell casings rattling like death’s labored lungs. They’ll show you pictures of children lost so young, their parents become living ghosts of a slide projection reel, haunting rooms of muted coughs and anxious feet shuffling to nowhere and for nothing. Get your Lebron James jerseys, before the next Powerball drawing, before the heatwave to end all heatwaves burns down the redwoods and every quiet place worth saving, before the lightning bugs sleep forever in the soil rather than waste their light on a world that doesn’t want it. This is the slow repetition of surrender that pulls back the hammer and places the gun to the temple just because it can. Grand Canyon convenience ~after Walt Whitman O canyon! Grand Canyon! the daylight slowly fades. The final notes from a golden horn, ever so softly played. Plans are drawn, crows are cawin’, the curtain is falling on a lifetime of erosion, a river’s quiet calling. It’s death! Cold death! The heart of a Coke machine! To fill the land with quarters, and give the cliffs gangrene. O canyon! Grand Canyon! preserve your majesty, in the face of destruction, one must lose their modesty. They’d see your bosom marred with scarring, a cancer of coffee beans and souvenir shop parking. This canyon! Our canyon! Is more than a Coke machine! This land holds time’s thread traced through a river’s vein. The bulldozers idle like growling dogs, iron teeth set on edge, the canyon has no words but wind for its own defense. They’ll say that beauty, like memory, naturally fades, they’ll say this life is a sucker waiting to be played. Stand up! Preserve majesty! Defend beauty as if your spleen, for when beauty is buried in change we give our souls gangrene.
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