Monday, February 25, 2013

Michael Dickman / White Migraine


WHITE MIGRAINE

A NEW POEM

by Michael Dickman
Every color
there ever was
is white

It peels the skin back from the roof of your mouth in metal petals that taste
  like snow

The roof of the world

My fingernails floating in milk

The moon
flushed down
a toilet

Everything I ever wanted glows in the moonlight

Ask him what he wants

I want to be sick and white

and cough up

lilies of the valley

*

The Matterhorn
in my shoulders ruptures
in the toilet

My mouth walks down a hallway in a hospital

Clouds
of bone and cum
in the brainpan

White caviar gets shipped from my brain overseas then scraped out from the backs of my
   eyeballs with beautiful spoons
I can’t throw up anymore

I have to throw up

The mother-of-pearl spoons are tuned razor sharp and sing

It turns out
white can make the world
absolutely clean

*

On all fours the universal position of love is white

Oyster shells
turned over on a bed
of ice

Oyster shells
turned over on a bed
of lice

The white tongues speaking to me now speak in white tongues   

Are you loved?
Are you loved?
Are you loved?

I sit beneath the avalanche and sing

My master
plan

is happiness
Michael Dickman wrote The End of the West (Copper Canyon Press, 2009) and Flies(Copper Canyon Press, 2011). He also wrote, with Matthew Dickman, half of 50 American Plays, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2012.

Believer, May 2012
http://www.believermag.com/issues/201205/?read=poem_dickman

No comments:

Post a Comment