Four Poems By Jake Kennedy

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

On Safety (Bricks)

Fuck it. The smartest pig resolves to brick-up the doorway, damn the windows, and stuff the chimney with mortar. Goodbye, remarkable tree: the ten-hut of the trunk, the leaves’ sustained fireworks. So long, apple rotating just so into the sunlight. It’s usually up to the moon (farewell) to spike the wolf’s fur while it sleeps. That’s desire, too, isn’t it? … any thrill — good or bad! — from elsewhere? Well, adios bear shit versus lilac perfume. No more goosebumps, then. The trowel labors against tensions and harmonies — until the bricks make a crypt of unreadable books.

On Difference (Knots)

Study, Executioner, the halyard, reef, bowline, sheep shank, and the succession of slips. This impersonation of nothings (droop and wilt and limp) gets tautened into the finality — a togethered snapping-to. Amazing or ehn [shrug]. Then? To unite, like this. And when the mother saws the rope from the son’s neck then knife, neck, and rope are also past, present, and future. According to the blood, none of these objects are unique. Once the knife breathed in and out, the rope cut itself, and the throat tied its own noose.

On Denial (Junebug)

Hunkered gestapo, Tollund toenail — waiting for one word to activate the big transformation: bloom it out of char and back into fire again. Only some chants are permissible, contingent on the experience of the town cryer. Like the bellow: run. The news is usually ‘don’t tell us.’ The news is ‘let pleasure reign.’ In two fields separated by a concrete wall, the body that splits itself in half is highly moral but practically screwed. And this thing is a machine, muttering with that classified information. It hurtles down and it never resolves — a burnt satellite, sizzling in the grass.

On Mischief (Masks)

If it deepens, it’s mise en abyme; as when spreading the deck of cards diagonally across the table creates Muybridge photographs. If the gag keeps going then ‘identity’ is proved false in Scooby Doo. The cellar as an order of darkness; the cedar chest in the cellar as a deeper order of darkness. Then the cut-out eyes equal ‘and so on.’ As if too true to be suffered, the mask is ripped off and dashed to the ground. There it is. So in the environment of the newspaper cartoon, it’s traditional to mount human heads above the mantle while, below, the deer sip sherry and read the funnies.

Jake Kennedy is the author of The Lateral (Snare Books) Light & Char (Greenboathouse Press), and Hazard (BookThug). His work has received Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry in 2010 and the 2006 bpnichol Chapbook Award. Poems have appeared in or on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, CBC Radio, Drunken Boat and Diagram.

For more poetry, visit The Poetry Section’s vast archive. You may contact the editor at [email protected].