Lunatic Speaks
by Caroline Hagood
In the dream I'm under a cow tent
in Africa somewhere, sucking
my own sweat though a straw, feeling
that I am nothing but a sum of small things, snails,
fly wings, dust bunnies, candle drips, leftover
air. When I wake, I feel so empty
I eat everything in sight.
My hurt is crystalline, taking on never
before seen patterns of beauty, subtle
in that way of things that belong to the mist, like cotton
candy and the blue drool that follows, or the haze
of teeth whiteners and skin powders that leave a dusting
of synthetic snow across the dermis, newly fallen
shadows, so close to not being, spinning
alone in a vacuum.
I still smell of cow and my eyes
have started to rain. I married
a weatherman so that he could tell me when my brain
would start playing misty for me. The plan backfired
and I'm up in the middle of the night watching TV, can't sleep
with this buzzing in my head, not quite pain
and not quite light, something crueler, a mooing of the mind
trying to run away from itself. If I'm not crazy,
then why do my thoughts speak a language
that I can't understand?
Is the oddball orange peel of this world
in an atlas all there is? The globe carved up and impotent,
like a discarded foreskin? Watching episode after episode
of this stupid surgery show reminds me
that people are really just pieces of meat, tendony,
with puffy unindentifiables, many-colored protrusions
that can be undone with instruments like the felling of the first tree
that I do nothing to stop, just swivel hips,
shake some rump in the lunatic disco
as the jungle goes down.
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Poet Caroline Hagood is a PhD candidate at Fordham University, where she
works for Poets Out Loud. Her first collection of poetry, Dispatches From Inner Space, was a finalist
for the 2011 FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Shooting the Rat
(Hanging Loose Press), Movin' (Orchard Books), The Huffington Post, amphibi.us, and
Into the Teeth of the Wind, among others. She has read her poetry at New York City’s KGB Bar and
The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. She has also written on arts and poetry for The Economist,
The Guardian, The Huffington Post, and Salon.
