No Farther Than the End of the Street neighborhood poems by Benjamin Niespodziany Okay Donkey Press, 2022 ~ How just recently undiscovered the poems feel in Benjamin Niespodziany's No Farther Than the End of the Street, and how secretly they demand distraction. I've been ill of late, and in this lateness have come to believe that revelation does not come, after all, to those who wait. So I waited, and held, then read, this inescapably freed book. I am weak and want to say things simply. I strain to recall whole silences. I write that love is made of two people telling each other that they have a room at the hotel when neither of them do. Niespodziany takes the nameless and the familiar at face value and lets one mask disguise another. I am weak, I strain, there is joy here. In this verse, a neighborly, twinning joy...and a sadness brought to earth both by the alien mediocrity of grief and by those few doubled things that go through absurd shortages to single out loneliness. ~ reflection by Barton Smock ~ book is HERE
Erasing the scarecrow’s ankle with a cigarette. Cutting the hair of the crucified. Stars and jobs and stars.
In reverse, the baby looks like it's helping the doctors build a machine. I smoke on the roof and my brother gets a nosebleed in the cellar of a house we're not going to buy. Art invents time to impress pain.
Nude I carry my untouched handprint into the past disappearance of a photographed leaf. Pain and sickness lose each their memory but lose god’s first. It’s dark in the dark. Lift a spider’s broken finger.
The sleepwalker and the insomniac asking god to switch their hidden pregnancies.The fly my ghost calls rain.A vaccine for object permanence.
This church doesn't have a bell. This angel has no bee. Pain resets god.
People leave the room to talk about god. I become someone else in my sleep.
I wouldn't in another life know where to begin. I make others lonely.
snow has to be the loneliest food
A son goes online in a country of grief. In a city of sayings. My teeth don’t fit, is one. Puberty struck the wrong dollhouse match, is another. Enough, though, of that. Angels don’t have a language. Pain uses its ghost to bite god in a dream.
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