Song of Expedience
By Brendon Booth-Jones
—For James Mone
Walking down the rutted winter lanes of my associations
and hearing a surreptitious rustle behind my ear,
I look to the left, where a metal-heavy green-haired teen
drags his feet to church on Sundays. Saturdays I’d creep
in through the three a.m. backyard
so high I worried my scalp might scrape the stars—
and still no escape from God, from guilt. Gilded questions
in the Chronic Kush bamboozle of my cartoon-flowering head:
given the millennia of death, why so little silt in the river?
Then waking in the glowing boundless lilt of acid to ask:
given the Rembrandt light dappling the leaves,
why are the flowers simply flowers, the trees trees,
the clouds clouds, everything now, now, now!
Everything folding in on itself, nothing outside of the text,
why must some things be broken, never to be fixed?
And suddenly, years later, with love on the ropes:
one more botched riverside tapas
and your bromance is toast. Your rapport gone up in smoke.
No longer finishing each other’s. . .
But back in ninth grade, your faith was already sliding
down a slope: belief with one foot in the grave
and the other on a banana peel.
Brendon, for the love of God, get real: sit down
before you hurt yourself. Or walk it off:
rare winter sunshine, calligraphy of bare trees,
always a reason to cry (bird with broken axilla)
or smile (remembrance of the sea). And a half moon
just below the surface
of the translucent blue signifier.
*
Brendon Booth-Jones is the Editor-in-Chief of Writer’s Block Magazine in Amsterdam. Brendon’s work has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Amaryllis, Botsotso, The Blue Nib, Ghost City Review, Odd Magazine, Peeking Cat, Scarlet Leaf Review, Zigzag and elsewhere. Brendon won the 2019 White Label Competition for his debut poetry collection, Vertigo to Go, which will be published by Hedgehog Poetry Press in 2020. Find him on Facebook @brendonboothjoneswriter.