5.10 from NOTHING CONCLUSIVE HAS YET TAKEN PLACE IN THE WORLD THE ULTIMATE WORD OF THE WORLD AND ABOUT THE WORLD HAS NOT YET BEEN SPOKEN THE WORLD IS OPEN AND FREE EVERYTHING IS STILL IN THE FUTURE AND WILL ALWAYS BE
There comes a time often in airports when you realize that
Even if you love what you want more than you love what you have got
There comes a time often in airports when you realize that you’ll never get what you want
Walking around in a landscape that approximates the president’s head is enough to fill you with loathing you realize that your poetry powers only work over slogans
You have to use signs to indicate your desires in exile
What sometimes occasions surprise is why nature does not cause the sea to grow bigger reading Lucretius and you are remembering a poem by Terrance Hayes written in the form of a crime report
There is a difference between waving your arms to communicate and your disappearance from the continent
There will come a time when your standing up will or will not be enough
It happens that the earth more often threatens a collapse than executes it
In spite of the black shirts
You think you are forgotten or anonymous in this exile looking out from your nest
You think of J-Lo and Bo-Jo and Sho-Bo and
Laughing with Jeff
You thought that once it was your job in the old days of language to resist light entertainers nazis and narcissists but all you would do was click to protest
And there were times when you could occasionally breathe out and your cells were not going wild having turned off their regulatory clocks
It was good to dive into fountains and be an Italian not abused by racists at night and the rivers of blood meaning
Everywhere you look white men are sounding off
You are one of them
Sounding off
And the plates beneath the oceans and the plates in Asia Minor will not stop you from knowing that the answer is to just sit with focus and good intent
And look out at the sea filled with children stopped from crossing the sea by other Italians and the fascists in other countries and their police
And the Buddha fields are lined up with them the way that your head moves from contrition to compassion to detachment
And each position is wrong
Even if you love what you have more than you love what you want
It is the 21st Century and the planet is full to overflowing
I am in love with your beautiful poems
And they come out in various countries in various editions
And I kiss your face or at least
I imagine that I kiss your face
Because of this or not because of this
I mean we
Are still lovers in love with everything for what else can we do
Every time you put your foot down
His chest hair covers the world like a carpet
Tim Atkins has been a member of the summer faculty at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, and a member of Carla Harryman's Poets' Theatre in San Francisco. He is the author of many books, including Atkins Collected Petrarch (a Times Literary Supplement and Salon.com book of the year, Crater Press),Deep Osaka (a photobook, Crater Press), Koto Y Yo (Crater Press), On Fathers < On Daughtyrs (Boiler House Press), 25 Sonnets (The Figures), Petrarch (Book Thug), and Horace (O Books). He is also the author of a play: The World’s Furious Song Flows Through My Skirt (Stoma Press), and a novel The Bath-Tub (forthcoming from Boiler House Press). He has read and performed his work in the Houses of Parliament (for Pussy Riot), in concert at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and all over North America and Europe. His work has been translated into Spanish, Japanese, Catalan, French, and Lithuanian. Mother—a collaborative film-poem made with Graeme Maguire was a finalist at the Cyclop International Videopoetry Festival and at the Rabbit Heart Film festival in 2014. His poems have appeared in many anthologies, including The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem (2018) The Reality Street Book of the Sonnet, and Faber’s The Thunder Mutters (edited by Alice Oswald). The founder and editor of the long-running international online poetry journal, onedit, Tim teaches Creative Writing at the University of Roehampton. His current work is the long poem NOTHING CONCLUSIVE HAS YET TAKEN PLACE IN THE WORLD THE ULTIMATE WORD OF THE WORLD AND ABOUT THE WORLD HAS NOT YET BEEN SPOKEN THE WORLD IS OPEN AND FREE EVERYTHING IS STILL IN THE FUTURE AND WILL ALWAYS BE and sections are appearing in poetry journals in the USA, the UK, and Canada.
