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Matt Hart

All my balls / in the air / It's a wash / Gravity calls


from Sermons and Lectures both Blank and Relentless

No performing animal-eagle     The snow the now
The people come around, stop loafing in the ether
of rhetorical bombs     launching and lofting
metaphorical missiles, distortions of the facts,
which laid out rightly are all and inclusive
Nobody's grip comprehensive, but all of us
living and drinking, loving and wallpaper
fucking the totality as we are its it     Don't wait
for the map of human being     Might as well
wait on the corner for some flowers to appear
from the mouth of a stranger with a briefcase
cutting cocaine against a window or a stranger
with a stranger haircut wearing combat boots
and breathing anarchy, state and utopia,
Robert Nozick     Might as well red devil
in the morning and heaven after supper
Today I feel—or rather I felt—something eager,
but then as an afterthought I got up and figured
something out     More similar than different
I want to include you in the electrical circuit,
in the electrical socket, we plug each other into
emergency convulsions, which is getting acquainted,
which is forming a new more inspirited constellation
in the shape of being together reading and writing
our separate, but similar and sexy green books
on how the earth is getting warmer, so we take off
its clothes and our clothes, but nothing seems to help
except weeping in the icebox, but cars get between us
and religions get between us and politicians especially
make a living of between us, of for an' against us,
of weapons and races and beards vs. beardless
and blacks vs. witless racist bastards vs. all of us
we gotta stop making so many damn distinctions
The fabric of America frayed all around the edges,
frayed even in the center     The new black panthers
and the dopey white answers and the drill baby drillers
the foreign investors     All my balls
in the air     It's a wash     Gravity calls
So I'm calling for a blending, not into the scenery,
but into each other toward a common understanding
What ails us is us, and what us is is all     We face
each other to answer each other     We begin
by shaking hands or with some other greeting
We sit at the table and we listen

from Sermons and Lectures both Blank and Relentless

Deathstar to rock star     Both blank and relentless
I love in my basement     I live in my sky

But I hate the way I treat you when we're bored
and ever clever     The billionaire in Chile
spent his way into this lecture     Satanic in the grasses
with my daughter's white ball, so I called

the village elders, but they had to come in pieces
You should've seen me playing wolf and then yelling
for a saw     Jigsaw puzzle puzzling

I swung my neck and hit the window     One does
what one has to, but someone else is more

meadow     Someone else is more deliberate,
though deliberate's not her nature     What we should be
and call ourselves is how to burn a concert down     is

open ended battery     is drawing on paper
engorged with massive parties     This is not only a test

To feel like Aphrodite with 900 arms     Or a Phoenix
with a flashlight falling off of the horizon     The beast
is always more, and the more is always best     I hear it

in rotation with its screechy beatific     I'd hoped to be
oracular, but wound up academic, worked my way
through Spring and All, a forest thickly measured,

but found us both out upside down, the hymnal
like a pheasant     It was weird, and you were there,
a light and winged thing     A cloud filled donut

or a singer pretty vacant     Revolution but a figure
of amplified speech


Matt Hart is the author of the poetry collections Who's Who Vivid (Slope Editions, 2006) and Wolf Face (H_NGM_N BKS 2010). A third full length collection, Light-Headed, will be published by BlazeVOX in the spring of 2011, and a fourth collection Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless will be published by Typecast in 2012. A co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety, he lives in Cincinnati where he teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.