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FURTHER READING
Poems by Anselm Berrigan
Zero Star Hotel [At the Smith and Jones]
April frigging 6
Primitive State [excerpt]
Related Poems
Call Me Ishmael
by Jackson Mac Low
Knot iii.VII
by Stacy Doris
To be the thing
by Dorothea Lasky
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Poem for circulation

 
by Anselm Berrigan

Things surrounding things
fill my Wicked Tuna grid
 
heart with a swishy austerity-like
intention. I cut my post-fleshy
 
forearms & bleed a serious parallel
echo chamber reading everything
 
to approve of nothing. I massage  
my anterior cruciate ligaments
 
to celebrate a hard won royal flush.
This mind is slick-like and easy-like
 
and music-like and gesture-like
and, as I am the dappled heathen
 
you've been given internal permission
to dismiss from your sacrosanct
 
barricades and bounty systems,
coy, and shit-like. A second first-person
 
recapitulation does not defiantly
buy shape rightly here. Sane
 
continuity is your trashy blues
making progress out of heart's lack.
 
How should I know you're not
there bleeding, respectably
 
to conclude a moist relentment
and make my evil labors clear?









Copyright © 2012 by Anselm Berrigan. Used with permission of the author.
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