Saturn
I.
I need to take my typewriter out of this room
I need to take my body out of this room
Leave the computer
The shoes
The books of poetry
Retreat into the woods
Or into the mountains
Or plant feet against the roadside and walk
Into Chester
Into the Ohio River
Out of here
Out of this second skin
This brown paper bag
No text messages
No e-mails
No rejections of poems
No pencil shavings swept into dustpans
Hum songs to myself
Hum Johnny Cash
Bob Dylan
Townes Van Zandt
Tom Waits
Ray Charles
Snap my fingers
Sleep in trees and recite The Odyssey
Type poems on leaves
Type poems on leaves
Leave to Charleston West Virginia
Leave to Columbus Ohio
San Bernardino
San Luis Obispo
New York
New Orleans
Sit cross-legged on the sidewalk
Type love poems for Southern belles
For saints of Voodoo
For old blind prophet men
Buy stamps at the post office
Send letters to Sadie
Send poems to Tara
Send drawings of birds to the lonesome ocean
Send new words in bottles floating into Lake Borgne
Into the Gulf of Mexico
Into the mouths of great blue whales
II.
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
The walls around my body change
I walk from room to room
Square to square
And feel everything around me sparsely distributed
Like no surface on Jupiter
No surface on Saturn
Liquid core concealed between 88,000 miles of atoms
I love the sound of rain but when I hear the sound of rain
I have to wonder if it’s really rain or just an air conditioner
The eyes are here
My eyes are here in this skull
Though I cannot make out the details of rooms
My eyes are here
My eyes are here and I am not here
I’m in California
Reading Kerouac high up in the mountains over San Bernardino
I’m in Charleston West Virginia my favorite city
Walking barefoot across seventeen cold city blocks
With Jordan beside me talking watching night owls walking
Looking down at the street of bricks
Looking up at the stars in the sky
I’m in Buckhannon West Virginia dear old Wesleyan College
With Sadie who shared her umbrella beneath the sunshine
With Tara who wrote of stardust in her hair
With Merrin who made me new, and now we have dissolved
With Walter who leapt up the stairs sounding barbaric yawps
With Patrick who walked back transfixed from the jazz concert
Their hearts have gone into mine
Their hearts have been so generous
Their hearts have forced these poems into my hands
III.
I want poetry to be angelic.
I want poetry to be beautiful.
I want poetry to be eloquent.
I want everyone to read me at my most eloquent.
I want to write about my depression.
I don’t want to write eloquently about depression.
Depression make this old endurance seem impossible.
Depression drag me down to the floor.
Depression distract me from my poetry!
Depression no good. It bad.
Depression is not a chrysalis depression is a brown paper bag.
Je ne sais pas quoi faire.
I follow a blog on Tumblr and the girl is German
And the Fräulein regards her own suicide mind
As a flower pressed between poems
A single-cell organism
Like it looks beautiful under a microscope,
Like it’s a nebula that propagates love and bright colors.
Everything she posts is in black and white.
You wouldn’t believe the ways I’ve pulled myself up.
One time I wrote in a notebook You have to grow old.
If you die at 16 you will never look like John Berryman.
I used to tell my mom I felt like an empty shell.
Grandpa Whitman says there is no empty shell.
He says the shell is the soul.
I love Grandpa Whitman.
He says to un-tuck your shirt,
To take off your clothes.
I’m only wearing my glasses and a pair of blue underwear.
I’m only wearing my glasses and a pair of blue underwear
And I feel so complete.
I’m in my underwear I’m listening to Lou Reed.
I think he’s singing to me.
All the trees are calling after you.
He is singing to me.
Help me in my weakness
Help me find my proper place
His body is gone.
Now he belongs to the ages
IV.
O Lou, sing to me
With your voice like black coffee
Carry me over Brooklyn
On an actual cloud of cigarette rain
–
O Lou, write poems on angelic rough napkins
Send them like raindrops into my mind
–
Lou, do you know I wear sunglasses
To look more like you?
Lou, do you know your songs
Are like plaster for my feelings?
Lou, do you know my feelings
Are eggs
That carry your voice with me
Everywhere?
O Lou, we both know that
Black is the absence of color
And the unchanging gray sky
Is an enduring struggle
The poker face of the universe
V.
Ah Lou, I need to get out of here.
I gotta get outta Dodge.
I just need to lay low for a while.
Take my hand as we pass through your New York world
Of cigarettes rain smoke
Black shoes coats and concrete
Send me with Jordan catapulting through the streets
On an Odyssey of faraway crises
In flannel shirt and glasses
Beneath cold heavy clouds in the astronomic night
Take me to the cool bookstores of Charleston
Leave me sitting on the floor
Stacked between cracked leaves
Take my shoes you know I don’t like them
Take me to Sadie
In Elkins West Virginia
Take me to Sadie
So I can do what a friend is supposed to do
Take me to Sadie
In her museum of trouble
So I can cover her tired shoulders in a blanket of actual dreams
And we may waltz out the window
Into the Polaroid clouds
I will lay my typewriter down on the floor
Wrap myself in new jackets
New York New Orleans
I will touch
I will touch the eyes
The eyes are not here
Nothing ever exists where it’s supposed to
Nothing ever exists how it’s supposed to
Ah Lou, your rainclouds are real and so noble
Beneath a universe that refuses to be tricked
Take me out of this room and into the world
All the trees are calling after me
Luis Neer is a young poet, painter and high school student from West Virginia. He is an alumnus of the 2014 WV Governor’s School for the Arts, and his poems have recently appeared in Right Hand Pointing; Verse-Virtual; The Rain, Party & Disaster Society and elsewhere.
[stag_icon icon=”twitter-square” url=”https://twitter.com/LuisNeer” size=”50px” new_window=”no”] [stag_icon icon=”tumblr-square” url=”blue-egg-interior.tumblr.com” size=”50px” new_window=”no”]
Cover Photo: Jos van Wunnik (https://www.flickr.com/photos/kristalberg/)