Poetry: Selections from Eric Subpar

You’ll Die From Boredom Going Back in Time

 

he called me ugly and stupid

and didn't even try to frame it

within a joke

 

as though my ugliness

and my stupidness

 

were so apparent

they had no need to be hidden

 

by the niceties of style

 

 

god gave me a tongue

 

when i do listen to bands

which isn't often

i only listen to musical bands

 

the music 

that gets me going

is music

 

and that's a fact

 

but i have been known to

dabble in art as well.

I've seen some 

and it definitely does 

 

that's for sure

 

literature never did it for me

though i've read my fair share

and it was all very legible

 

wordful, to borrow the Bloomian phrase

 

without a doubt

 

Little Richard Died Today

 

It came in on the red phone.

 

We, the monks of the ISS, 

watched as an almost imperceptible wisp of light, 

the way smoke shows up in black-and-white movies, 

separated itself from the static ambience of Nashville, 

extended and then crawled northward. 

 

By midday, 

Pascal mentioned it somewhere near the Great Lakes 

and I put on the B-side to a Deep Purple album

while we prayed. 

As sundown colored all, 

we held our hands aloft 

and witnessed the vapor churn pink 

as it reacted with the electromagnetic spectra 

before cautiously

then joyfully 

converging with the Aurora Borealis.

Eric Subpar is a poet from Washington State, where he lives with his wife and three sons.