Poetry by Otis Eliott
Of Aqua
From the planks of a dampened room,
dawn,
blumen suicides
draped over the mantels,
breathing sandpaper atmosphere,
resigned,
absolute.
Some hang like monkeys,
hooking tails
from aluminum ceilings,
where the only sense of design,
comes from consequential defeat.
And now,
for the first time in our bubblegum lives,
we flood,
outward, as the estuary,
leading elsewhere
than this manic cardboard platform
where we find ourselves at every sundown,
and rise.
The Pacific morning, what does it communicate to you?
Atlantic crucifixion,
half complete – never mind.
Couldn’t care less – they,
drunk on coal,
I, electricity,
plastic boned,
marching out into the courtyard
demanding my system is de-iced in an instant,
while orbiting the moon,
mane soaked in full fat cola.
Throw me to the lions,
Americans,
Britons,
and French,
swamping arctic,
Icelandic fury,
ahead – dueling landscapes with their armory disabled,
in waterworld, there are no victors,
only the floating corpses
of everyone you love and know,
bellies as buoys,
wet rotting nervous system.
By the arrival of Bangladesh
our clocks will have stopped.