by: Christophe Casamassima
Christophe Casamassima writes about love and its failure in language that is both conversational and disjunctive, strikingly elegant and brutally real: “…you become/ seaspray and wish/ you could fall/ apart her faith/ was so deep she/ drowned…”
a given viscosity
I am
only in love
in the way
blood runs
down the cheek
the neck the breast
but never
the inseam I am
in total agreement
that true
knowledge is laughter
my love
for you is deeper
than the ocean is
full of plastic I am
only trying
to think
of the right phrase the one
that can hurt you
make you hungry you will
replace every cell
every seven years and
every seven years
it will be someone else
who comes home
a perceived viscosity
towels
are for those whose
aim is ill
have to
skirt up the word
luck, and has it
run out?
anything
spilled is put in
the trash (the unfruitful
would have killed for it—the baby
is lucky) yes,
hermaphrodite is definitely the word (worried)
eleven toes, and the doctor is not
as you stayed, at the onset of rain
for the sake of the poem—
Catullus doesn’t need your fucking poem
his father clouded the tub
with semen, his mother
entered shortly thereafter
an exposed viscosity
our death is
the second to last
form that path marked
out loud the surrounding
beauty deafens that sound
you heard? me crashing
into darkness—of course
there is waking from death
only more revealed—you become
seaspray and wish
you could fall
apart her faith
was so deep she
drowned at it
because he fit so nicely
inside the music
an inequitable viscosity
no one
is an idiot
out of altruism
—for love, but one
need not give up
reason
voluntarily
when
that poor woman
dies they go
through her
pockets to find
—not children
take instead
her dignity
Christophe Casamassima is the founder and publisher of Furniture Press Books, and Director of the Baltimore Poetry Library at The University of Baltimore. He is the author of five books of poetry, including The Proteus Cycle (The Proteus, Joys: A Catalogue of Disappointments, and Ore).
