Tuesday, July 15, 2014

James Gendron, Sexual Boat (Sex Boats)



SEX BOAT

My open hands are innards.
The one I hold toward you
masks a whole castle
whose gate/gatehouse

makes one evil.
It makes our questions perfect.
Like a gift, it ruins us
gradually from inside.

Our true fate was dodged.
Our fake fate was dodged.
What could be left to us?

It’s never too late
to throw up.

Portland, Oregon poet James Gendron’s first trade poetry collection, Sexual Boat (Sex Boats) (Octopus Books, 2013), is constructed out of six sections of sassiness, sketchbook pieces, letters and sly talk in the form of short lyric poems. To be precise: five sections of short lyric poems, and one section, the fourth, made up of a sequence of lyric bursts. These are love poems caught up in longing, lust and sheer loneliness, aware of what has already been lost and just what else might be. Gendron’s pieces are composed nearly as train-of-thought explorations in lyric form. As he writes to open the fourth section, “IDEA”: “There are no ideas in death, just pain. It even hurts to take off my pants.” Whither the poem, James Gendron, for a poet who occasionally seems very pleased with the sound of his own voice. Very much in the vein of youth and the beginnings of real experience, these poems rattle and rail, clamour and clang about thoughtfully against the excess, embracing both light and the slow, steady dark.






WASTING MY LIFE

Wasting my life in the gleaming snow
aka cocaine. Did you realize the human body
has got over seven miles of braided thoughts?
Under this girdle of fat I’m wasting away,
in a sweater, eating from a bucket.
In fat I see myself distilled
more honestly than in my face.
It stuffs me full of non-predestined life.

Pain: where do you come from?
I feel you, because I’m emotional. And I feel you
again, because I’m remotional.




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