reflection on Jay Besemer’s ‘Men & Sleep’, Meekling Press, 2023

Men & Sleep
Jay Besemer
Meekling Press, 2023

chance animals
a man
a mania maintained

Jay Besemer’s Men & Sleep is a restlessly melodic verse of fractured energy and subtracted expedition. Ah, the maleness of my fake and tired knowing. A me-shaped forgetting. A you. I’m exhausted and can’t sleep. Sleep won’t die. I don’t know what my speaking touches. I don’t know where. Here is weather: The recency bias of the wounded latter. Here is a forest: The unbodied nearness of the hurt now. Besemer’s voice is pinpoint, but also un-surrounded. Bread and breadth. An underground melancholy, a pop-up tremor. The middle is the only beginning that can disprove origin. Tree, because tree. Ah, this formfitting imagery, squeezed through a scarred peephole. And these who-less creatures bathed far-off by the darkening of tomorrow’s remnant astonishment. It’s all here because it’s all there. One will feel partially found. Not by the all-ness of connection, nah. But by the mapped disconnection that holds things to the same legit remoteness.

~

reflection by Barton Smock