by: Scott Alexander Jones
This has nothing to do with Sisyphus
or the curve of your clockwork calves.
If I ask whether you pedal uphill
in evasion of sunrise
or pursuit of sunset
I need you to know that
the Buddhist in me still bites nails
which expand at the exact speed
of Pangæa’s glacial explosion across the sea.
The speed of the sky is 1,040 mph-
But you’ll have to ditch your bike to fly
endlessly around the equator
& pause the sun so it’s always
setting or rising or always night.
I don’t mention high noon
assuming you’re not eyeless
to faint starlight, low sunlight,
any cycle of moon.
If I ask how you chose the front seat-
(Was it a foreign penny you flipped,
antique from a thousand secret fingerprints?
What breed of bird on that side we rarely call?
Have you since spent it on blue Dahlias?)
I need you to know
efficiency is my only concern.
I promise not to whistle or offer you a ride.
My small BMX barely fits in the trunk of my Saturn
which is currently occupied with wine bottles
& those bowling pins we pilfered,
crawling thru abandoned machinery
for heavy things we have no use for.
Last night Tuvan throat-singing induced
scenes of us painting hearts on
bowling pins made of wine bottles.
An assembly line of two
decked out in white jumpsuits,
the girl may as well be you:
You paint variations of a valentine heart:
purple, arrow-pierced, cracked
with lightning bolt faultlines-
As I duplicate & duplicate
the same identical bloodthumping
clenched fist of a muscle, straight
out of an anatomy textbook.
Surgery in the Attic is the musical project of Scott Alexander Jones, author of a collection of poems: “One Day There Will Be Nothing to Show That We Were Ever Here” (Bedouin Books, 2009). He completed his MFA at The University of Montana, and was a writer in residence at The Montana Artists Refuge. He is co-founder of Zero Ducats, a literary journal comprised entirely of pilfered materials, and he is currently teaching himself the Tuvan art of throat-singing in Missoula, Montana surrounded by yellow & yellowish & yellowing leaves.
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