The Poetry Section: 'Intimate Immensity Safe Room' and Other Poems by Paul Foster Johnson

The Poetry Section: ‘Intimate Immensity Safe Room’ and Other Poems by Paul Foster Johnson

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

The Poetry Section is quite pleased to bring you five-yes, five!-new poems by Paul Foster Johnson.

Colonnade of States

Happiness, long in coming, mists the windows
of the theme restaurant. A guard with a cleft
forehead works wordlessly on our compulsion
to submit. Ours is a nation run by military
bureaucracy, but here its absence is generalized
into an atmosphere of control and more
basement bars accommodating travesty. It has
become necessary to shrug off the Libra need
need need to decode the shiny ties at businesslunch.
Beneath a ring of golden women assembled
from compossible worlds or hallucinations or lies,
I feed the creative principle copious saliva, a sequence
of code spitvalved into headphones that furnish me
with nation language as late as 2006 and hope.

Gaylord Texan Panic Room

I like how a shadow gets artificially long
if I trust that it veils the unsayable
a convergence that recurs in listening to
songs about drugs when exercising
thinly veiled, sweatsuit inspired
by Oskar Schlemmer
Leigh Bowery and Teletubbies.

The cottonball shrubs are rendered to scale
but you cannot run to the lake as it appears
during undocumented drinking
where divine rays of light over a water attraction
distribute ridiculous comfort.
Do I dare enjoy a flank
coming at me unmediated by society?

He emerges out of nowhere
as if from behind chaises longues
too volatile to be out experiencing syncope
thus giving meaning to procedures
by reading manuals in hill country.

A thorax bearing scars of childhood surgery
condenses every straight boy
who has made himself available.
Here I signal ambivalence about sausagefests
like polluted sunsets or their artificial beauty
always worried that the outcome will be confused
with funk art.

Visual Agitation

I compensate for passions that never claimed to be new
waiting for distortion with a crocodile bag jabbed
at my rib. What I have against it crumbles
and gapes. Lines culminating in exotic skins
leave me suddenly lusting for a tan in something like
a solar puberty, gaily pulling streamers so I can present
something hopeful. Sad I do not not not know
the angels of the facility or the order of their passions
transplanted into sheetrock across the diagonal
from the cafeteria to the elevator. It’s the new year
and they are willowy. My loyalty is easy so I clear
the entrance to make of this less a shithole and more
the magic union of subject and object, ungovernable
passions not not not scantly springing into action.

Study in Pavilions

The river hurls itself into the sea
with acid, bitchery, and clumsiness
as happens when we are asked
to invent improbable scenarios of travel
accounts surcharged by lovesickness
that finally come to be told
on a dilating screen
in modular units exclusive of breath.
In a Bay Ridge travel narrative
she curled a horn of hair
into submission, hair and eyes
like team colors in an exhortation
to cultivate personal style
while I confronted bisexuality
by rubbing a jewel case demonstratively
over emotion poured onto a bed.
Someday language will ordain
isolated dance moves on a pier and experience
will be organized by carousels.
I wish I could remember
who had been thinking a lot
about shame even though
they left me to wonder
if they were serious or kidding.
Wonder is a reflex
that allows me to avoid relating
generationally like with a 90s frisson
of NWO or a suspicion that seeming
randomness is purposive.
For days I meant to establish myself
in a carrel, to camp permanently.
What is your relationship to carrels?
Are they where you arrive, snack-laden,
at universals? It is said that they are underoccupied
before we arrive there with our sorrows.
Hallucinations projected onto them
would describe an ideal or an arc.
Instead the burned-away part has followed
me here, an extension of myself
proceeding into the wilderness
between sand-colored buildings
a victim of violence fueled by organ music.
I wind myself around my inheritance
of monism. I would rather make my own ether
than have to explain again
that I don’t work with images. My ancestors
wrote poems on napkins.
The weeds of the railbed
make me want to prove I am not
the fruit of my father’s
modest civilizing mission, desiring
a cigarette in greenery
and it is suspiciously green
with plant fluff in the gutter.
So tell a story of infelicitous recurrence
deficient in affect
thriving on awkwardness
not mechanistic
even speaking to being lazy
in love, lazy in research
indulging emotional substitutes
for serious matters as they cluster
around an epiphany or whatall in your mouth.
If it bear resemblance
to a succession of drones
or the mysterious black boxes
replacing trashcans on subway platforms
secret it into a bower or bus shelter
paranoid spaces, lucky charms
that I indemnify and hold harmless
best visited after hundreds and hundreds
of thousands of hours of practice.

Intimate Immensity Safe Room

The germ of the house
is a paraphrase
of the windowless, doorless chamber
we mince toward.

We want to go somewhere even more remote
and see a bald eagle
erasing its kino-pravda
see the fossil record of absence and dread of the inevitable
in a forest setting
after which we can sport fictions.

We want to go to the sea
at low tide, when it gives up prefabricated shelves
and a creature will launch itself upward
suffocating for our benefit.

But I am at work and I mince toward a chamber
my voice is a doorchime
always when my mind goes blank
in the middle of explaining phenomena
in this case “Can we all get along?” taped there to the wall
in paraphrase, its border an abundance
of gingerbread men.

I would not flinch though sensible to typography
insofar as it is conveys a person, like GOD in all caps
or one presently lisping, awakened by art
which it uses to jog something in itself.

It hammers terms of art into a shape
before branching out from a peach sweater
to a pink shirt, brooking crashing noises
as everything outside backs up.

Paul Foster Johnson’s first collection of poetry, Refrains/Unworkings, was published in 2008 by Apostrophe Books, and his second, Study in Pavilions and Safe Rooms, will be published in 2010 by Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. With E. Tracy Grinnell, he is the author of the g-o-n-g press chapbook Quadriga. His poems have appeared in a number of literary journals, including Cannot Exist, GAM, EOAGH, Pom2, Fence, The Portable Boog Reader, Antennae, Bird Dog and Octopus. From 2003 to 2006, he curated the Experiments and Disorders reading series at Dixon Place. He is an editor at Litmus Press and lives in New York, NY.

You may contact the editors at [email protected].