Full Stop and Flower.

So, I wrote this book.

It's called Full Stop and Flower. If you read it you'll find out why. It's a bunch of poems, most of them pretty recent, that I collected and rearranged and drawed some drawings about, and the drawings are also in the book.

Copies are just over 30 pages, and I'm selling them for $5 each. If you want one please let me know! You can contact me at jessemburke@gmail.com. The release party is this Friday the 13th, and afterwards I will be sending out a bunch in the mail to whoever ordered them.

Thanks for your support!



Also, I'm pretty sure this blog is dead or dying. So you can consider this my last post.

fiddlehead

i slept among the ferns that night
my head growing heavy with
their sad healing wisdom.
there was a fat fly who followed me
all day making fat noises in the sun.
that morning i had eaten a small
handful of blueberries --- wild ones
from the side of the road,
growing out through the wooden
fence slats. my hair once got tangled
in a thorn bush and it took no small
amount of pain to free myself.
i thought of the fly and i wished
it would fall, wished it would be still.
i slept among the ferns that night.
the grass crept under my naked ankles.
i tried not to think of hobgoblins
and gleaming and dark dark wings.
i dug my fingers into the roots
and slept there. i was born in a hospital
not so long ago, grew up in rooms and cold streets
fell in love lying on concrete with a bloody mouth
woke up every day looking at the wall,
the wall, the cracks and dimples in my boneless wall,
and it took no small amount of pain
to free myself.

is it my birthday yet

your hands make bitter coffee taste on my face
drawing black spiral lines and i shake
you shake invisibly divisibles and
your mouth is an open grave.
hello what are you saying
i can’t hear you over all this noise,
please repeat yourself and stand on your head
we will all be very much amused yes please
your mouth is spilling coffee onto me
and i cry.
your hands are dripping motor oil
we’re all asleep and you’re screeching
to yourself in the corner like some strange owl
from Europe or Paris, aren’t those the same thing?
i spent a whole day looking for you
you were hiding in the hiding place
that’s where i slept last night
there in the hiding place
pulled the blanket over my head
and sang it sweet
like summer drinks
and summer love
and all the things you know how to forget
i forget how to forget
i remember everything
i remember
one day
i rode my bike
across the bridge
and up,
up,
and all these aliens were singing alien blues
in all my ears and i heard them
and again i cried, i cried again
and you were somewhere feeling sorry
and i felt sorry
your mouth is an open grave.

i have taken off my shoes
to relieve me of this infernal heat
emanating from my pores and my forehead
especially my forehead
glad something’s cooking up there at least.
my feet smell of cheese,
now my hands smell of cheese as well.
poetry is not worth a thing.
you can’t put a price on it,
poetry is a dead cat,
gotta be a no-one.
i apologize if you are reading
i apologize if you are writing
we regret to inform you
that the jive will not subside.
poetry is an old church and we’re walking
inside and looking around, not sure what’s
it all for but looks nice, yessir looks nice allright.

tomorrow i will see you and coffee will be on the walls
and you will see me and the whole sad sorry mess will
start over again like listening to the radio, start it up
again this is the only one we’ve got.
tinny and confused.
that’s summer for you. breathe it all in while you can,
breathe it all in before you breathe it all out.
nobody ever said this wouldn’t be easy.
was that some kind of joke?
no it wasn’t i’m serious now hey now

they wrapped him in a death shroud
and stood him over his grave
and he waited
and he waited
and then they let him go.
----tell me, how does one
adjust to society after such a quote
traumatic unquote experience, period.

Fyodor i don’t know much but i know you know
and that’s something. well? isn’t it? isn’t what? isn't that.
bohemian. kafkaesque. orwellian. subjective right
of individual schizophrenia societal dues pay 'em up
here come the dogs boy you best watch your back

this poem is too long
your nose is too long
trim it just a bit here n there
not important just cosmetic
get ya the ladies an whatnot
as if once you get em and have em
then that's it - it's all done forever and ever
no more words come out just having and having
and having and letting go.

let me say to you i have sat upon the cold bleachers
in the night and i know the signs of fire and i have seen
the birds dead and buried and i know what it is
to walk for five six seven hours without sleep and
without a clue and i know i know
and there's no need
to explain it all
it's just there
and you're just
there and
your mouth is an open grave.

Four Short Poems / The Same Poem Four Times

On the other hand it's the ghost that haunts you.

Dead things choose us and do not let go.

A man without a parcel is no enigma.

Best to have libraries, whole caravans of

catalogued bodies following you down the mountain.

"Baggage," they say, as if it can be neatly untucked

and sealed away in motel closets.

--

In the photograph your shoulder is whole, immaculate,

glacial as your eventual eyes, hidden as a smile.

My heart has a heart has a heart.

All things, unless anchored, that is to say

tied down, will drift away.

--

If a dead bird is enough to make me forget,

a live one is enough to bring it back.

--

I would have remembered you just before

opening my lungs to let the water in--remembered you

scattering my one-eyed visions. I would have compared

dying to dying while dying. Instead I stood up straight

and puked four times. For you, I thought as the river

pulled it all, swirling, away.

at the bottom of the valley where the river runs through
i do not remember your voice any more.
i remember the sound of it, warm honeyed against
my eyes, the facts of its meaning. i hear pounding
in the basement and howling at the windows,
and i daily walk through lakes. clouds clamp down
over my head. i spend all my time pulling
hairs from the wall. i do not remember your
fingers, only their thickness, and the drumming
hallucinations they danced. i do not remember
anything but waking up this morning: dry-cracked
and empty, listening, curled around some new
ruby thought whose hands waste no memory.
all my notebooks are empty, all my pockets full.
i spend all my time writing harmonies on dollar
bills. i'd rather smell tea than do anything about it.
at the bottom of the valley where the river runs through
a cloud crawls through me and i am happy.

apple for the carrot child

Ill; discomfortable. Waking up to aches and maladies. Eating like dirt, like hair and teeth. Force it down your throat: swallow quiver repeat.

The only music is like ice thrown to the ground. The only intimacy is distance. Paradox, mystery--call it what you will. The bell still rings. One day you will grow into your body and you will find it stuck to you and you will look around and say The world is here look at this How sane How beautiful and difficult and Therefore True. Sometimes what you imagine is not true and then you don't find it anywhere and Sometimes what you imagine is true and then it's as if We Are All Here. You can find your place.

Some days all you can want is the rain. Never forget, if you can help it. Memory is the key to the city, the apple for the carrot child. Sunrise is a kiss after twelve years in prison.

Never forget, if you can help it. You may climb a tree and call to the field. You may think of a thousand honeyed fingers. You may follow the vines to their dewy Maypole ends. You may stick and swear and bleed out into the soil to pass yourself along, tag you're it, retching truth like a crushed lung. You may; but if you forget you lose your photograph hands. If you forget you become a breathless carbon-chain leaf left loosely in blueberry fennel: empty flavor. Never meant to be tasted.

Remember bread: fingers spread. As though it could be solved.

unresolve (hung time)

Lord deliver us from the Unholy Self of mind
that plagues our waking with destruction distraction
pull us free from our mountains of fire where we dwell in misery pride
send us truly love and absorption and the light & fire
in everywhere that we may alight as candles
trip through life steadily burning.
how green is my eyes and all therein!
clean us! clean us! to be marvel creatures
who gape & cry at all insects blades of grass
fruit on the vine bones and cloudy days.
tear away the dead flesh the dead mind the wither spirit
and make us as water bleeding into all creation
joining in beads and pools to make Known.

full stop and flower at the glory and wonder of the dirty concrete city
which is allowed to stand in its time and does not burn.
the Lord is grace! love is do, and all strings must be cut.
words are not answers and not life. words are hunger,
a voice crying out in the street (in the desert) music in corners and
the foot-stomp on wood in sweaty rooms.
the world is a question mark and we blots of ink
may crawl and claw and never answer but with our hands.