Chamberlain’s Birthday

Collin Brennan

In the daytime:
Wading through pools of instant coffee,
stumbling across one sunlit sidewalk on a beaded string of sunlit sidewalks,
darting between glimpses of the inferno tearing up the fabric of the afternoon.
Today’s fragile battle cry: the Lord Jesus Christ was once an unborn fetus!
I feel as if any minute we are liable to break – this scene, this crowd –
to scatter barefoot in the street as splinters of a storefront window pane.

A Haitian man bites into an apple on his lunch break
CRUNCH!
The moment Rimbaud or Reverdy might call poetic crisis
is a slippery sonata, one of the prettier songs I’ve heard – all about being outdoors
and getting closer to the air.
It reminds me of what a friend told me once about writing:

it’s all about dying in the next minute
and never wanting the minute to be over.

In a pedestrian way, I imagine he meant it’s more of the same
lyrical bloodshed made holy canonical
by the Athenians, Prussians, and Americans
(all looking for a fresh catch in the fish market of history)

but what it is now is something I’ve lost and can’t have back,
a punchy line that comes when there’s no pen to write it down. Still,
on its way out I remember that there is more poetry that will breathe
through me tomorrow or eventually, I suppose.

In the nighttime:
Returning home, dropping Versions of Issa on the wood-panel floor
(Haiku poets would have handled pavement delicately, or with thoughtful scorn),
soaking my skin in the brand of whisky I’m told a relative sipped in the night before
wading through mortality to show the krauts who’s boss.