These five poems are from Lonely Christopher’s Crush Dream, forthcoming from Radioactive Moat. An interview with Lonely Christopher appears in EOAGH.

A Tiny Fluffy Puppy

I must dedicate this much
of my brain
to being socially/
economically frustrated
or else there’s no way
I could, you know,
make art;
a tiny fluffy
puppy barks at and challenges
a piece of broccoli lying on the floor.

Crush Dream

I am the little Dutch boy
in the branch of a linden tree
Nobody loves me     I am
so lonely.

Give Love Away but Charge for the Verse

Multiple linguists have famously positioned
themselves across the small part of town
where the staff puts a difference in my hair.
I am not quite able, not quite feeling, sir
I am not telling the truth for the hell of it
I am not even though, I am not the song
you purchased                 but I’m the song
you get.
When my peers saw my ashen dimensions
occasionally one of them pitifully sulked
into a daring smile, split wild milk follows
and darned the portrait of a graceful pass.
Harrow
and bemuse.
There are only barren lands
and topsy curves
and one night stands;
there are only the things you invest in my
genius.            There are only the ways to
God and man, to wallows work and session
bands, to bankruptcy and to the fallow urges.
I knew a man named Richard who
drove a car into my room
and told me not to watch my dealerships.
But it was too late, I fear, for all of that
for misery, mise-en-scene, and dastard
flat, for derring-do or hunger or a cure.
For I have lived a million days if I have
lived a year, I’m sure.                  And none
the wiser, none the better for it. So shit.
Several different excuses have occurred
to the turn key this quarter. We await
instead of aspiring. I will compensate
for that, you shall parse all obligatory
relegations in the tree of my odd youth.
God is a factory, God is above.
I am a victory I
am a love.
Pay me.

I’m Sorry

A boy in an off-the-rack suit
waist deep in a lurid pond
hands in his pockets and
staring at a swan
swimming on the surface
of the water the tawny color
of the winter sky.

Quiet Leviathan

Emotions are unsuitable, which is why they work.
What do I pray for in my pillaging when the end
of the day emerges from my cold and distilled face.
I must not trust words, that must be the thing
the gym inside a kind of unsounded trumpet that
I just let lie crass and submissive in my act as I
drown in the salt lake of tremendous plagiarism.
To use the words, to solve my egoistic calumny
meaning the time it takes me to get up of mornings
and put on my specs. O, godlike disaster, there is
hardly any human cleverness to rectify the price.
There is only the image of what I want to be done
and have existed, throbbing in the memory of what
prideful I dare not speak and what educated in the
embarrassing language of self I can’t make a tune to.

Lonely Christopher is a poet, playwright, and filmmaker. He is the author of The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, published in Dennis Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery series from Akashic Books. His latest project is a trilogy of poetry books titled The Death & Disaster Series, which consists of Poems in June (The Corresponding Society), Crush Dream (Radioactive Moat), and Challenger (forthcoming). He wrote and directed the feature length film MOM. His new summer Tumblr art project is Pixelated Twinks.