Introducing
Ethan Kwak
The News
Did you hear about the graffiti
by the high school gym?
The mayor just addressed it
and the government came
in hazmat suits with yellow tape
and the top psychologists
are currently analyzing
it and the poets are
calling it art and
the gossipers say
the end is near.
Someone came and
wrote the bane
of smalltown society
on a wall.
Someone wrote
IM FUCKED
and the police are
looking to lock up
another crazy one
because most of
the crazy ones
are already locked up.
And by the way
did you hear
about the major spillage
last tuesday
in the school cafeteria?
Two cups of OJ stained the floor.
A disaster.
Once
I was born in a gray building that was once a sidewalk in a previous life,
in cotton garments that were once seeds in the wind,
before I grew to write poems that were once five dollar bills
and met people that were once strangers.
I like to think that I was something useful, or at least sentimental
like a scratched up record
that plays in the background when two lovers first meet.
Ill see that movie in theaters,
turn to a stranger, tell them that I used to be a song.
In another life, I was a scholar of anthropology.
I like to think I was close to the truth before I died
and was reborn in this body, the one that speaks to you now.
The truth of what humanity once was, to what we all were.
We couldve once been wobbling cubes of jello
saliva on a babys bib,
fire extinguishers, pails of rainwater.
We couldve been strands of cut hair
on the floor of a barbershop,
We couldve been peach pits
and pomegranate seeds
We couldve been lions,
we couldve been raw power coursing through utility poles,
seaweed stuck between teeth,
the stutter of the answering machine.
Now we are the sound of something shattering, over and over again,
Just another generation born in an echo.
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