Thursday, May 14, 2026

Revision of a poem from “Ideas of Improvisation”

 A CRY OF IMPROVISATION WITH A POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS


In a bus station bathroom, scribbled

initials trigger—

Piano Trumpet Sax Drums

Peyote Trazadone Sinsemilla Demerol

—kisses on my nipple 

or a needle’s pulse through my arm—

but if—for religious reasons—I lick 

my fingers do I taste the assault or

the grain you pearl into a luminous shell?

What else deigns to color a domain

in the hippocampus or paper over

a toilet’s oval until I tongue a girl named

Apophenia like a Percocet and perhaps

my documentary is also soundtracked

by plunging syringes or trigger clicks

but right now the score reflexes startle

these terror tremors waiting on a bus. 



Even as sum of what’s been done to me

the unified self is a useful fiction.

Do you recall—

Piccolo Tambourine Synth Duduk

Pulse Tremor Seizure Dementia

—when busses just meant kisses

when fingers didn’t trigger unasked touch

or arrive as an evening express to shame

where the Speaker desires to disembark 

or blow smoke into a parallel reality

where our sages are more than mere apes

with a vocabulary & a rational capacity?

Why must the four cords of these memories 

extend or bend into an encore by

the band Cycling Back To The Seen,

who often have lyrics about night sweats

but never arrive before the bus hits us?

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