Poetry By Louis Bourgeois

Buffy May CC




SHOOTING HERION ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF TOWN

One grows tired of killing snakes, gutting lizards, crushing spiders.  My furniture is full of death; there are bones in the walls.  They don’t speak nearly enough.  The carpet is an ocean where I am lost all the time.  Outside the window, blue dust stirs in the wind.  Further, the wild screams of children eat up the air.

I confuse myself sometimes with the guitar, a Tupperware bowl, the toilet and a clay jar.  I pick myself off the coffee table, examining the thing that I am; a fork, a plate, a cobalt blue candle.  My eyes are annihilation, my toaster tells me so.  One shouldn’t eat toasters, but I have eaten mine.

The fish in the aquarium are dead and have been for a long time.  I’ve watched them float for days.  In the yard, the voices keep ringing in the tall grass–earth angels keep repeating a name.  They are sad; time has done them in too.  What are roots that never clutch?  The trees are too full of spirits–they are too lucid to think about.

Down the street near the marsh industrial machines fill up the landscape.  I go there and feel ageless–my arms and legs are spread out on the horizon, where the wild geese migrate in V Formation, frightening me with their large wings.  All birds are people–you see yourself trapped in their faces–the thought of a cormorant can kill you.

Where I am, no one has ever existed.  This world has never existed–no one has touched the green grass, no one has seen the crystal streets–machines are your only friends–all men are robots who throw off their disguises from time to time and disappear forever where nothing is everlasting:  the birds are heavy in the sky–all things fill you with fear and make you sad–you hear the echo of the sky and stars haunt the blood.

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Louis Bourgeois was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is primarily a poet, but he has published translations, fiction, memoirs, poetry and interviews in over two hundred magazines and journals in North America, Europe and Asia. He graduated from Louisiana State University with a BA in English and was the first graduate of The University of Mississippi’s MFA program in Creative Writing.  He is the Executive Director of VOX PRESS, as well as the Program Director for the Mississippi Prison Writes Initiative.
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