Two Poems

Dream Disaster #1

Hunting for moods
Is trending in a dark spectrum
Coal and pesticides
Were the last thing
They had too much
Time to decide
So picked everything
Deliveries Mon-Fri made the streets unbearable
She put on sheer netting over her custom black latex
He picked up his small dog and put it in a bag
To get on the train
Heroin chic had its moment
And here we are
A protest vaguely stirs the conscience
Of a construction site
Hanging homemade flags
The plant rose like a steampunk Oz
Surrounded by shanty towns
It’s been pointed out that crime is expected
In such close quarters
TB the second cause of death
By an infectious disease
But its romanticized qualities have dissipated
Infections during the most superstitious ages
Gave rise to the appealing myth of vampires
And their associated fetishes
Pale skin and drastic vitamin deficiencies
My dream disaster
Involves an accidental poisoning
And its subsequent hallucinations
Wearing my viscera as a shimmering suit
As I lead an army of service industry workers
To an early retirement overseas
In Bhopal for instance on a certain night
Only the poor have paid for
By spiting themselves further
Or through the five mysterious days
Of the Great Smog of London
Which peeled away the veneer
Of miraculous post-war industries
The numbers like the bodies
Don’t add up to anything more
Than just more numbers and bodies
Remember Segways and edible shirts
They seem to be part of it as well
As we move up and around expanding worlds
Burning tires and immolating monks
Mixing metaphors at a cyanide cocktail party
Cutting and re-cutting what was already finished
A cold war of the unverified heating up

Infinite Duration

              Or

Textbook Modernism

It begins with the construction of a set
Nothing is its appropriate color
Anything can happen
A market crash may cause
The production to fold
And things will remain this way indefinitely
A human-sized playground for mice
Undisturbed lounging for flies
A hastily attached light crashes down
Onto a table that has no chance
After a time a new idea might take hold
And is laid over the existing foundation
Everything down to the handles
On the cabinets is painted
In a single camouflage pattern
The players in monotone bodysuits
Fresh from Hamlet’s overbearing speech
Destroy each other emotionally
In crude remarks without basis
The raw head of pig is delivered
By a young man in a rental tuxedo
A refugee from a reception
Who recites the menu of the last supper
Of the lord of a mansion in Surrey
In the middle or late 1800s
Right before he died of an embolism
The pale fellow is given a tip and departs
Next to the brutal reviews of this fiasco
In a national newspaper
There’s an ad for an air freshener
A rosy-skinned person
In a mountain setting inhaling deeply
Puffing out their chest in a plaid shirt
It’s all too much and you wish
None of it felt familiar
We’ve worn out our welcome
But that’s part of the routine
And the test audience agrees
And it all goes from there
Your jowls dragging like someone else’s knuckles
Until the next thing picks you up
Or fondles you into a new excitement

________

Armando Jaramillo Garcia was born in Colombia and currently resides in New York City. His first book of poems is The Portable Man (Prelude Book, 2017). His work has appeared in Boston Review, Gulf Coast, TAGVVERK, Prelude, Pinwheel, TYPO, The Opiate and others. In his spare time he improvises on the piano daily as a way of thinking about art that is non-verbal and he loves breakfast and a bike ride, which he starts thinking about the night before.