The trouble with poetry
and other things resembling poems
here in the late Honda dynasty
all comes down to ballistics.

The wind blows
the apple that astonished Paris
through the doors of my heart,
stray home to the blue iris moon
on the meadow,
into mouths of white egrets
following the Truro bear,
but fails to slake thirst for
the apple trees at Olena
and other adventures.

Under the shadow of Sirius
are the pleasures of the damned,
acolytes and unincorporated persons
versed in vengeful hymns,
new bicycles circumscribed
to rolling only a village life,
gathering collected red bird leavings,
evidence of a losing season,
love poems bound as
“Selected Newspaper Blackout Headlines: Volume Two”
The critics favorite in the restored edition?
“Ariel Nox Upgraded to Serious”

Wait here,
bullet.

Wait here
until after
ballistics.

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Poem constructed from the titles of Poetry Foundation’s current list of top 30 best-selling poetry books – “Contemporary Best Sellers: Week of June 7, 2010”

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/bestsellers.Contemporary.html
(although from the way the URL looks, this page will all be changed by next week).

I guess as a challenge, one could attempt to pick the titles out of each volume of poetry without cheating by looking at the list, but I think the folks who could pick out EVERY one could probably fit in a small lecture hall. So if you can do that without cheating, you’re in very select company – which may be part of the point (ballistics being a means of identification and, etc., etc.)

I’m embarrassed to say that the only one I would have been able to pick out beforehand was Tony Hoagland’s new book, but only by the title (which I broke up) and not the author. I’m probably more embarrassed to admit that as someone who’s supposedly a Bukowski fan, I wouldn’t have been able to pick out “The Pleasures of the Damned,” which apparently has been out now for over a year and a half.