The Best Poems ever written (by someone named Jimmy Stanley)

Svalbard

There might be a version of me just awakening right now

From a long polar night to a cheering Norwegian crowd,

Ecstatic for the aurora borealis to finally disappear

An illusion quite lovely before you might start to feel

That if the best we get is a solar wind, then maybe we should just take the hint.

That if we can inhabit an island in the middle of the Arctic Sea

Then maybe we could do just about anything.

Then maybe we should be doing better things.

But then I got out of bed for the first time since June

And the last person I expect to run into, I do.

I said “I thought you were gone, the biology students

Write little papers and extract bits of ice

Then fly on back home to get on with their lives.”

She said “what about those like you here that have stayed

There must’ve been someplace else from where you came

I think that that’s me

I want to be here for the real thing”

So I cursed myself for spending the last eight months sleeping

But then I remembered there’s like 20 other guys here our age, at best

So I probably still had a pretty good chance. So I smiled

and dropped dead.

Where You Were Going

I chauffeured my friend and his girlfriend around at night when I was in high school

Because I lost a bet and it was fun and I liked being out when I wasn’t supposed to

They broke up four years ago but he told me she texted him

She got the job she’d always wanted out of college and he was graduating soon

So clearly a lot had happened

Do you remember when you worried about things

Like where you were going, not realizing that some people stay there forever

The issues of four years ago feel melted away

Because I still can’t think about them without my heart sinking

To go back and get good at guitar again

Or spend more than two months with my girlfriend before it’s interrupted by school

There’s a pounding at the door, it’s someone who wants to take my credentials

Unwritten rules that demand you no longer enjoy something without considering it’s benefits

An acquired understanding that you shouldn’t do things that harm you in the long run

But I think it was better when there was no voice in my head telling me what to do

It’s not that I’m not happy it’s just that I was then, too

And I liked doing the things I knew I shouldn’t do

They broke up so long ago and it matters to me more than it does to them

I am continually amazed at how little people seem to care about their own lives

But it’s really an ability I don’t have; to not dwell on things for too long after they happen

So I do it on their behalf.

Jeremy

Kasey said not to name him or I’d get too attached

Incidentally this ended in me killing him with an empty bottle of wine

At first I named him Mikey but I had to abandon that since it was too close to Mickey

And Mickey is already a mouse

I like to think that Jeremy spent long nights under our fridge reciting scripture

He was a Reverend to his mouse colony, and a damn good one at that

The little ones looked up to him because he spent time alone in our house

And none of the others were intrepid enough to follow him into the unknown

On an early morning Kasey saw Jeremy scatter across the floor and yelped

As one does when they see a mouse in their kitchen, and what came next was procedural

The purchasing of a mousetrap which is not as fun as the boardgame

But actually quite gruesome and definitely sad

In the dog days of August, Jeremy must’ve listened to the warm breeze

And our friendly conversation which an alien would hear and think I’m a crackhead

But I like to think that Jeremy thought I was funny, and I found him cute

But now it’s March the twenty-eighth and Jeremy got stuck in Kasey’s trap

He was stuck and pulsing and I had to do what I did

But I didn’t like it, and Amanda and I said a prayer before it happened.

Atom Bomb

My room is hotter than I’d like it to be as my unconscious mind freaks itself

While the air molecules are terrorized by the the big white fan

Churning cyclically and breaking bonds irreversibly

I’d like to be able to look up how atom bombs actually work

Without being put on some sort of list

Incidentally, I carry little knowledge about how the forced dispersion

Of one little lego can unleash an entire world of destruction

But it checks out because only one man really shot the Kennedy’s, respectively

One person fired the first shot in every war

And our world is primed for destruction because we pull at each other like cats at yarn

For the slightest misunderstanding

It only makes sense that our way of life continues through the senseless understanding

Of mutually assured destruction. They have one, folks, but so do we. Worry not.

I think, perhaps, the bigger threat isn’t that they have one

If the politics of our species has taught us anything

it’s that there’s no reason to fear the one who could drop the bomb

Because there’s just nothing to be done.

Lunch Walk

I took a walk during my lunch break

To the semicircle cluster of benches surrounding the Center School monument

Where old neighbors and teachers once went to Elementary

The environmental diegetic sound is effective tertiary music

Even though I’m not listening

I try to look busy as the pretty lady walks by, she is either truly busy or copying my idea

I see an acorn on the ground at Mead Park

I see thousands of acorns

I wonder what qualifies something to be an invasive species

Acorns are technically a fruit because is contains a seed, but it’s classified as a nut

I wonder why the same rule doesn’t classify a coconut the same

Maybe they thought putting nut in the name was enough of an association

I pick the outer shell off with my fingers

As I grow comfortable with the task I dig in, below my nail

Tolerable jolts of pain stimulate me

I forget this is a break in the day, just for a moment

I come to a rough spot in the nut fruit

It would be so much easier if I just used my teeth

I pull it up to my mouth as I’m slithering through a crowded part of town when I realize

That I’m going to look like a squirrel

I scan my surroundings, to the coffee shop and the people enjoying lunch al fresco

Like I did

I follow through because I’m in the clear but now every solitary eye wraps around to me

Everyone stops what they’re doing like in the Truman Show

I’m homunculus and the evil squirrel has what I want

I sock him in the eye and cartoon squiggly lines disperse from the blow

I rip the acorn out of his paws and become large again

He attacks my leg but he’s still just a pixel

I pull him off and pet the rodent into a trance

Once he is asleep, I lay him down in his den where he begins his winter hibernation

And I go back to work.

The End

Unprecedented-- electing to walk without music, for the diegetic sound

Since any good song I want to hear would make me think of you

And I just don’t want to do that right now.

Freshly cut grass and the understanding that this is all coming to an end

I try to spare myself the turmoil by ignoring it

But I can no longer pretend.

I’m out of my depth trying all these things that I haven’t

But I’m making it work a little too easily, which is the part I find the saddest

We can be way too good at adapting.

While I’m walking this is all getting contextualized

That the world is ending, and so is the one that I’ve built

And people will wish me luck and I’ll wish them the best of mine

I go off to find a new place and prepare my new perspective.

fin