Poetry

500 New Freedoms
Lewis LaCook
Liberation shouldn't be death, or oil, when business
fists sift through an unwilling countryside. A butcher
wipes the excess of a people's hunger on his apron;
the swath is black, like tar rumbling in the
truck-tank. When I walk Staples Mill (named for the
old plantation and its simpler lifestyle, when
skin-color was economic), I walk against a tide of
surging vehicles; 
 
uncap the growl at a filling station, stare down that
blank eye into the belly of pro rallies: are we all
sliding there? Last night we made love twice,
trickling the gush of our desire over each other, and
it was a more pleasing rain than this. I sit here at
the bottom of my country, whole and unharmed, limited
to slash-and-burn theories of how to better myself in
their 
 
religion, staring up at the cruelty and crying: when
will liberation and love lie down together in
unstained grass? Are 500 faraway deaths no more near
than an ocean of automobiles?
Syracuse
Lewis LaCook
Like eyes, closing dawn with rolling
credits feels like the birds never
sleep, but go on like water eating
the present out of crystal Syracuse
and all;  the flames are
different this morning: blocky,
 
impounded, like cigarettes, stinging
whips of smoke that circle the cat
stiff with warm regard. I lift night
from the streets and from the
aspiration of pavement, just so you,
worried I might accidentally shut
the alarm off on the clock, can tick
 
my hope off on a round nomadic pitch.
It looks like this code travelled well into
the unbearable, rebelling against a logic
that keeps those in power who have
already paid their taxes, and fail
 
the silky veins of transubstantiation;
or fade along the railings  like
a memory of smoke.
The Best Part of Classical Conditioning is Salivating 
When I Hear Your Name
Lewis LaCook
Dawn wads up some
crepescular negritude,
like finding John Brown's body bruised
back into the hollows of your dreams. He'll just
give you Mingus' number; 
 
porkpie hat cocked soddenly cheerful
in the surprise snow of March passing.
Out on the
white house
lawn,
 
Dawn sheds her dress in flirty
ripples of prodigal light. Aime
Cesaire and Georges Braque
count the spirals on a notebook
of misplaced real estate, where
 
misplaced people fight an invasion
of strip malls. They'll always win, just
won't notice it. You lie back
in your leopardskin pillbox chair,
 
dawn nodding out on morning's
solipsistic shoulder, and let me
calculate through your veins
these seconds before water
 
slaps us in the eyes
to wake us up.

Lewis LaCook's both text and hypermedia, has appeared in Cauldron and Net, Shampoo, sidereality, 5trope, and Slope, among others. Published books and chapbooks include: Cling (anabasis, Washington, 2000); The Odious Art of Lewis LaCook (BeeHive Microtitle, e-book, San Francisco, 2001); and Drowning in The Age of Mid-Air (xpress(ed), e-book, Finland, 2002)

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