So the Carnival Does Not Crash
Bikini Jesus of the red hanger
come down, you manger
you’re not meant to be up there
you poet, come down, you are a box
for living things, cows, farm animals
Picking up lines from the half head gone
ripping off sweaters from the should be dead
not knowing how to clean them
watering the plastic lawn
looking fancy in the old loser den
Literature is the last gasp at bank robbery then
westward expansion drove a few centuries insane
I have nothing to say about Jenner, the Palisades
or Crescent City
it’s mostly locked in now, so I say
Thieve your gay pages
chase poems like an ostrich
acknowledge your neck
peck your books, you coward
Lift and lift until you’ve convinced
yourself you are no longer
some other faggot’s robber-baron
And as I lay my head,
tragically, poetry is farce
I’m sure most poems are born in taxi cabs
disorganized blankets
bad breath at birth
or in rebirth cut out of a bruised sky
The Way of the Dodo
The oven needs a safety valve
so death to interior feeling
I’ve jumped in front of the train of tobacco-romance
and football is a mirror to the world
level heads are stepping away
Erol Flynn freaks me out
Jazzmustache eradication
weeds heaving wind jowls
mealworms in suits throw last pitches
stitched up christmas ornamental
nuclear war freaks me out
An oven needs its safety valve
and Johnny got found out
in Argentina in retreat
that loudmouth is a rice crispy dictator
weepy, wired, marshmallow man
Boca, Boca, Boca always
even the long-gone birds know that
songbird on layaway in a baseball
cap and if I’m to go the way of the Dodo
let it be known:
The Dodo was righteous
laughter is a hole filling body spasm
Heraclitus, by way of Columbus
says everything flows
and our oven needs a safety valve
Flora and Fauna Will Change San Francisco
Owls turn to birds waking
on scheduled sun-gaze
gaze rock toads
would-be campions
arguing with sand say
eagles do not become trees, now
trees concern their branches
in the spaceship indent
off to the moon
a shoddy rocket never
kissed an in-love pelican
that opened its gullet
which is all to speak:
a sea lion in a boxing glove
could never get the best of me
Jack Nancy is a writer from San Francisco, California. He lives in Oakland now. He loves detective novels, cows, Kobo Abe, Alfred Jarry, & PKD, Star Trek, M*A*S*H, and Liverpool FC. He curates, with the poet Scott Bird, the Coit Tower Poetry Club. His first book of poems, If Only In Combat I Find Love, was published this summer from Biblioteca de la Barba Metafísica, a lovely press in Mexico City. You can usually find Combat in stores in the Bay Area, NYC, Seattle, Mexico City, Amsterdam, and Milwaukee, or, of course, on the online.
Poems courtesy of Biblioteca de la Barba Metafísica
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Heavy Feather Review 