I invited my friend Gordon Massman to grace this blog with one of his poems. Here’s a poem from his 2000 book The Numbers (Pavement Saw Press). Gordon Massman: The Essential Numbers: 1991-2008 will be published in November by Tarpaulin Sky Press. Other poems can be seen here and here.

1428

Today he awoke with apples for eyeballs, bright red jonath-

ans misshaping facial bones, two roasted pig heads on verti-

cal platters, black swollen eyes lids cannot fold over, stems

upward like rope fuses, big dappled bulging apples, vision-

less, pulpy, fresh but growing rotten and ripe for fruit flies,

he would be a nest, and these things braided to the optic ner-

ve like weird lanyards, love-transformations, hands into spat-

ulas, knees into spuds, and orbital apples, she resembles the

apple, rotund, globular, cupped, a round bumpy ball prying

his sockets, they’re all one apple--cores, hearts, achilles

heels, mahogany seeds, appetites and rejections, coquetry

and refusals, the sweetest little hooves--too many bushels,

his face aches from gratitude; to a man a billion women

flown together with compressive force into a mass resemble

the apple crammed into his sockets at three AM, hard crisp

ones squinching his face with powers of destruction, ever-

y molecule burgeoning with droplet of cider, he adores, he

applies no discrimination, the disconnected molecules catch

between his sockets rushing to his heart, this morning he a-

woke moaning with sweetness, big three-dimensional sweet-

ness large as softballs, door knobs, hip replacement joints,

he swayed, he knocked over candles, he stubbed right knee

blind with significant brutalizing gorgeous orchard pieces.