Adrian Matejka
while we talk about hunger & loss. I once had artful chatter before it got
unsustainable. I once beat everything around me like an unrelatable
heart. Once I spaced out at the skull-bright codicil before it got bland
& unreliable. I once had a red hammer in my hand. I played it in the freight car
of my singing emancipation. I once had, I once had. Two guitars from
the pawnshop instead of feet & I still couldn't swing my big ideas. A woman so fine
I quit eating meat of any style. I once had sixteenth notes where other people have gears.
An altruistic jones for affection & touching despite my engineering. So much
I didn't matter as much. I once had a heart but sold it for sauce. I once had
some semi-glossed gators but lost them in the static. Really: I had a double
cross & a six-string, clean as tap water. I lost both beauties in the radiator
steam. Really, I had somebody who loved my frets & strings forever.
Imagine that: anybody loving my rust-bucket & cardiac needs together.
from the book SOMEBODY ELSE SOLD THE WORLD / Penguin Books
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This poem, inspired by Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain,” is working through loss as litany. Like a gentler version of Etheridge Knight’s “Feeling Fucked Up,” the poem turns hurt inside out until sadness becomes anaphora and epistrophe. The story of “Maggot Brain” goes like this: George Clinton told Eddie Hazel to play guitar like his mama died. But later in the recording, he tells Hazel to play like his mama is alive. There’s a metaphor in that unforeseen hope. Even though the world is breaking apart, there’s still a chance we might be able to turn it all around. 

Adrian Matejka on "Let's Get Acquainted"
Color photographic portrait of a pensive Kaveh Akbar

"The whole project of the book seems to me to orbit my learning to sit in uncertainty without struggling to resolve it. By working in a form that corroded the certainty intrinsic to that grammatical unit, the period, it felt like I was enacting (read: practicing) formally what I was clumsily groping toward in my own psycho-spiritual practice."

via THE RUMPUS
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