Joshua Edwards

Translation broadens language as divorce and remarriage extend family. Born to fade and break, facts huddle inside black brackets. Work means inquisition as a child separates a cricket’s wings from thorax. Ideas come apart as monads, metastasizing rhapsody on the edge of delicate dusk. Thunder sounds in the distance or television, always on in this constant rain.

Love of air and water Joined in apprehension, Perhaps you know what's there By way of fear, for while Living in pursuit of And going always forth Toward something that trembles. Its knowledge is your mind. What do you think about The great ocean's sullen Aristocrats—these small Headaches and dark affairs That bathe themselves in your Staging grounds, where you go To contemplate how what You want became your mind? The black oblivion Offers no reprieve for You, hunter—in its keep Your ears have grown too sharp, So sharp you almost hear Your own heartbeat over The subtle whispers of Water’s dismal gardens. Everything about you Is overblown, even Your mouth is uniquely Talented at its tasks, Gathering for slaughter Animals in their sleep, Speaking without a sound. Noah had seven laws, You have only one—eat To build life out of death, Survive above all things. The fatalistic moon Filtered down upon you Seems an imitation Of lives you will not live. Would you be its hero? Would you call out against The morning’s weaving light That shames the night before The passing of its cool? Would you be at the beach When the invisible Becomes a glow, to surprise? Inland, workers dreaming Of unitarian Proposals lose no sleep To fear about your mouth. It is their wayward friends, Who wandered too far west Into fevered chaos, That wake up with your name As screams exploding dreams. The inland ether holds Clouds in your dismal shape. Lucky are those who know Nothing, who cannot see Hell outlined in vapor. Somewhere a piano Plays a sorrowful song Half-written by the hate That a grieving loved one Would stick into your heart. Such are the arts of men. Beware. Your time is near. Someone has learned lessons You didn’t mean to teach. A crowd is gathering. Your skull is their kingdom.

Many nights while walking home after work, from downtown to an apartment below a market, I’d think of Alfred Espinas: “We do not get together to die, but to live and to improve life.” Sudden changes of weather and contagious diseases nearly broke the spirits of many friends that winter, but charmingly we made habits of dancing and sharing meals in our cramped rooms. Our landlords were thieves and our bosses were pessimists, yet we dreamed of a new phase of civilization, one of kindness and goodwill. “We need communes,” Oscar exclaimed. Silvia argued, “But islands are corpses, let’s think instead of syndicates.” Mondays we’d return to dirty dishes, copy machines, and dull knives, and we spent the next three centuries doing what we were paid to do.

You hold onto life like a hostage. You're deeply embedded. You're an actor slipping into a new script. You're a comma Whose purpose is to mark the moment when prose is suspended, Where begins a poem's pensive silence or some dark drama. You're a Charles Dickens character in the opium den Of a long life. All you want is to sleep through the nights after Satisfying intercourse, but your mimesis may have been Caught by sexually transmitted diseases. Disaster Is an evening when you're so hungry every apple core Evokes grocery stores. Being the only one and only, They can't clone or disown you. The only thing you lack is your Adult teeth, beneath the rotten teeth of what makes you lonely. And the truth is that devolution concurs with disposal Till it emerges, when entourage lobbies for Decalogue, And hype is the new preparation before its proposal, Calling for the removal of all shoes, shirts, and demagogues, And the zealous anti-Orientalists who refuse to Use anyone's last names first when denying them service at The sperm bank, where the preferred euphemism is "super glue." Remember the joke about the butcher who couldn't get fat? Rejuvenated vaginas and enhanced penises squeak Thanks to Puritanism gone gaga vis-à-vis bling-bling À la bada bing. People piled up form a sexual peak. Two condoms put up their dukes inside a contraceptive ring. Champagne is the new organizer for your political Campaign to conceive something tantamount to FASD Of the spirit. Were you surprised or did you wax critical When you emerged from the driveway to your domesticity Without any disease but your family's questionable Cultural history? Is it such a mystery that your Mediocrity's latently poised to emerge? That you're full Of traditional vulnerability? You'll pace the floor Until you face (at a number of paces proportional To the gravity of the insults that have been thrown your way) Yourself dressed like a clown. Your brain will halt to urbanely sprawl And then catapult your past beyond your future like a clay Pigeon across a clear blue sky, toward a lemonade stand At which the theory of other minds attempts to explain Why petroleum prices fluctuate with body count and Meaningful relationships end in kaleidoscopic pain.

It is not pain that holds me back, but time With its sad prefigurations and smell, Its flowers and echoes, rivers and crime. Even now, without a future, I tell Myself lies in future tense. As my hair Thins, I collect combs. When clocks chime, I groan. The falling world finds pleasure in despair Because to suffer means to be alone, And I suffer through all the accidents Of change as though I were settling a score, As if to disinvent what death invents. I once built a castle, now I do chores. To pass the time I rearrange my things. To fall asleep I recite names of kings.

Wrongheaded and obsequious on vacation, unnerved by new surroundings, I miss the bright feeling of belonging and the familiar patterns of my country, its virginity and schizophrenia, my several stolen bicycles.