by Jason Diamond)
To celebrate National Poetry Month, Flavorwire will be posting a poem a day. For today’s installment, we have a poem from Brooklyn poet JD Scott.
“Tribulation” by JD Scott
All night the hustlers move through my room, slapping me awake.
They sing, “My Love is a K-Hole,” which topped the charts
in a year not unlike this one. Are all my lovers as tired?
In bed I wear a three-piece suit and pray for salvation.
I push the Benadryl ghosts off the edge of my sheets
over and over with pixelated hands. It is a complicated act,
like dining on a birthday cake of arteries, or inversely,
all the chambers of the heart filled with barbecue sauce.
Meat and fluids, my desiderata keeps this room from starving.
One tag is tied to my toe, my big toe, and I am cold.
Someone keeps stealing the good half of the blanket.
Outside, another dawn comes with swollen fingers, with 8-bit blips.
I drift. My hustler, the one I possess and haunt—my favorite—
pulls the curtain back. He says, “There goes the rapture.”
Beyond my window there are piles of vests and dresses,
neckties, sad, sad scarves. Something is happening in the sky.
The hustlers stick an ice pick into the air mattress.
A dedicated hiss, like tires rolling out of a laundromat.
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