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Four Poems
by Jasper Bernes


Inventory, Invention

Eggs, diapers, psychoanalysis: I still can’t count to three
without amounting, insuperably, to another thing.

I’m where the miser hides the bodies, in the open code.
Their fluids zip together. Their grimaces simmer.
As long as this smile stays wired to your bling, I’m here!

Breakfast, antidepressant, cogito: I can easily that.
I can extract the indecorous, deadbolted ethic
from the gangrenous fist of disaster.
I can play why.

Four is a lower forever, discounted,
whose inventories gun us humbled down to half-movements
backward, cilia flailing.
One’s a nothing, summed and unswimmable. Do the mother:

forever minus nothing twice and you’ve got you
grammar with a sex drive.
Heart murmur, wind tunnel, hope chest.
Height, width, shitlist.

In the effortless, evanescent dueling distances
Paradise inflates the revenant
to hernia, to hammer and hallelujah
where the inklings and faltering figures
are swept into luscious, fulsome coherence.

Inside the gravid eggs, diapers.
Inside the diaper, another motherless egg.
I just keep amassing, unconscious.
A regulation cognition, that.
Meat, milk, melancholy.

I sink, therefore I sang.


Eternity

About those empty, imitation things I cannot do without
without a body

the enemy handbook
suggests two basic spectra: dying and "dying."

Yes, in the purgative fluorescence of the go-go bar
they’ll tell you so, they’ll scrawl you a lipstick Paradise Lost
on your missing torso.

I look up at her heretical knees
and tensored quiddity

and witness to the last, flippant digit
the debasement, utter, of this penultimate fantasy.

If the "I" offend thee, pluck it out.

If, somewhere in the fetish-encrusted sewer
you find that writ of habeas corpus called cogito: no contest.
If, in the memory-curfewed metropole. . .

I was your “index of maladjustments,” you were my blood sample.

But then, all morning, adrift on the off-gassing
plasticware, the neighbors’ brittle propinquities
beggar, perfectly, and so on.

I’ve been staring a door in hunger, starving a hole in hell.
Its starry frippery. Its bag o’ sad.

I’m in the basement with half a face.
I’m in the attic with war neurosis and uptick.

You call the fantasy history.
I call it everything but:

the universe, that cancer of the hallelujah. . . .

Insurance and Social Change

I was those things, or did— Because

one counts (to one), one’s worth (once)
(artillery, siren, palliative wish)

It snaps your breath in two: there voice (moist), there body (hot).
A politics pickles you in switch and far.

Airtube and speechtube, those mortgaged handjobs,
land you among the miscible authorities
and their flooded cellar of unretiring highs.

Lucky for you, the acoustics are bad.
Echoes piggyback on other echoes so that
person sounds like prison and prison
a bigger misprision. Sounds like sounds like sans light.

But also wall and water, both kissing
motions in the mouth, if you could swim
across the mouth, kiss across swim.

Your props: a slivery wing of fragrance
silvered—dot dot dot—to periscope,
an amputated brake pedal and the business-
end of a damp velleity.

One of those things is thinking (one’s one once won, wan . . .)
The other it’s so out it’s back in, again, as if
the electrocuted horses
under your encysted doubleflesh
would lean in, less close, and fish us out. . .

Therefore are the leaks in likening caulked and starred
with junk correspondence.
Therefore am I yours to fashion and disfigure,
hearsay’s orphan—

while the heartlit capitals
disinter their ministers from the harrowed floodplains.

World Bank

A starve of stars on the stairs of someone’s burning braincase.

I’m not sure what we should feed them—
city-lineaments? stingers of manysong?
Does that sound too?
                                  Hanging as you do around the toppled textbook-redzones
I roger that, I pseudonym your syndrome.

The Tsars engorge the stars with antimatter; they culture life; they assure.
You’re not getting any kind of consistent voice here
because, I imagine, that theory depends almost entirely

upon the scarcity of petrochemicals. Stuck period.

I wind up my toy soldiers and march them off the bridge
and into the tossed-rice of the assassination-coronation.
Carbon-based life is so the new black.

Telescoped, in the side mirror, the backsliding
stop signs. TNT Builders.

Voices the consistency. My constituents.

                       *

Rivals arrive; they are not riven; the better secrets mass near the exits.
If you must be right, disagree with everything.
It’s more common than you think, the sex-in-a-polling-booth fetish.
A lover sells sails by the railyard, by definition.
If you must be right, say everything.

But let’s admit it’s not as [sic] as the other side’s version of the end.
She closes the book.
Your boyfriend is caught masturbating in the boarded-up concert hall.
Insignia slice a mattress of fat from you-know-what-I-mean; hat of fat; medical ladders.
It’s not as precise as a blood type or anything.
It won’t get back to Dad.
She clocks in at the deleted factory; you hit escape.
Every citizen gets their own war.

If you must be right, I know, wrong everyone.
I’ve seen its only friend in the Infra-Store, in Hygiene.
He’s not advertising.
There’s a torsion applied haphazardly to his face.
Something Russian perhaps but I can tell immediately I won’t find it in any of the search engines.
I’d have to drive through a beta-version of Oklahoma at felony speeds with a butterfly net and an open
            40-oz. of Tarantula Ice.
Deeply satisfying the crickety sounds the house makes sinking into the marsh.
Play the tape backwards and forward at the same time and you can hear all the luscious amplitude of the             dead.
You can hear the stars rat us out, hesitations marks in ad-copy.

I hope she’s pretty, our reader.
That fire is a theater in which our unprotected speech leaps!
I hope everyone’s pretty.