Not 27

A "found poem" containing lyrics from some of my favorite songs of 2012

We’re behaving like teenagers

Making less than minimum wage,

Jumping in front of trains all day.

We mosh for enlightenment,

Telling each other what nobody knows

after three or four Old Fashions.

Washing off last night’s troubles

in clean white shirts.

Every time we write our lives in disappearing ink,

It becomes taboo.

Every time we take pictures with our phones,

It turns out right.

Once, you said, “you’re going to like this”

in a dark room.

I can’t remember if you liked what I said.

But I woke up at noon,

missing someone I don’t know.

by Jake Adams

A Clean Way to Talk Dirty

We were never exactly pure animation.

Each time we touched,

Fidgeting in the off-kilter moonlight,

We took road trips ending

at dilapidated Disneylands,

Calling each other’s ex-lovers

some mornings before breakfast.

We watched spontaneous explosions

on Saturday morning cartoons,

Thinking long and hard

about the way flirtatious vampires

wear sunglasses in Victorian England,

joking that no one ever really goes home again.

It’s funny how a room with the lights out

Can remind us of permanent Halloween masks,

How we still get nostalgic about

the way blood drips from an I.V.

Alaskan summers have nothing on us. 

Signs and Stars

Like anyone,

I don’t suspect

We’ll live through this.

 

Left with

just enough hope

to build bridges                              

out of wood chips 

 

It turns out

The wind itself

is the greatest detriment

to freewill

 

We are pulled

like orchard apples

 

We are sung by

Auto-Tuned pop stars

in padded rooms

 

We want to turn out

to not be  blades of  grass

scorched on cloudless afternoons

in the suburbs

 

The sky erases

all understanding.

 

 

By: Jake Adams

Respiration and Revelation

There are only so many ways to be alone.

A perverse sort of pleasure holds each solitary breath hostage,

As if anything—up to and including the silence under my own skin—

Could replace raindrops melting on our backs,

Half-lines whispered in tentative candlelight,

Or second-hand hip-hop played

In another’s used kitchen.

Who can face the impossible future, quietly, comfortably,

By one’s self?


By: Jake Adams

Money Is Anything

Once, you told me

When the sky closes for the night

Over that river, you know, the one with the fast food wrappers,

It feels a lot like the last track of With the Beatles.

That’s all I wanted.

To hear.


By: Jake Adams

Over a Long Time Ago

From a cabin and a photograph of her

I deduce the meaning of used guitar strings;
the skeleton under my skin.
Whatever kind of snow that falls,
it falls all night.

As if a goodbye could be a remembering.
Imperfect morning
finds me again.

Collaborative poem with Vince Bauters

Also Wilco

Really.


We drove forty-four and a half miles in the rain,

tearing up across every other song.

The usual procedure.

I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t easy.

Am I more attracted to you,

or your erogenous anti-art?

All these insecurities are within us:

I forgot to be brilliant.

You forgot to remember

the silvery stars.

I am trying to make you,

See.


By: Jake Adams

Off the Map, Wherever You Are

Everything’s a memory.


El Paso, Texas with Dale Watson:

I touched her hair,

the only cool girl at a Sufjan concert.

Everyone else is already taken.

This feeling of being 2,400 miles from the snow,

yet wanting to feel the cold encroaching like

a maverick child who knows no better,

or a subway system that loops

around and around

to the exact same spot

before derailing in a random act of God.

Asymmetrical hymns of praise

sung by sober sailors

who need nothing more than

that old tyranny of sacred sacrifice.

Who understands the cryptic music of desire?



By: Jake Adams

In a Converted Rumpus Room

Our good intentions crackle


Beneath the surface,

A specimen underneath

     the cover glass.

How to explain this tiger-eyed desire

Silhouetted across the wall?

One night cap becomes

     one morning-after text

An un-anesthetized folk song

     for an audience of one.
By: Jacob Adams

After

When time holds tomorrow hostage,


Demanding a payment for services rendered,

Interpretation should not be left to

sages and architects.

We must find a new urgency with which to build,

A structure for future muses

to demolish.

Inspiration must come in coffee cups

and tin cans,

Not to mention this forgetting to kiss

goodnight before sleeping.



By: Jacob Adams

This Forgetting Not To Grow Up

To lie sleepless with the ferment of joyful thoughts


Like it never happened

Settling is just another word for everything left to lose,

A manifesto about the future

That you discover

when you stand still.

You roll over, asking for the remote control.

Surfing for Leno, Jon Stewart, the Home Shopping Network.

A fractured montage--

A quality of being thrown together

Like strange names at railway stations through the night.



By: Jacob Adams

A Cruel Vivisection

Trailing yesterday’s tears, tomorrow


Invites us onto its lifeboat.

Going home is like licking drying paint.

Running away is like dousing combustible engines.

Carried away by a wasp-swarm wind.


By: Jacob Adams

Robots and Cosmic Puppetry

An Erasure Poem


She has blonde hair, very blonde, very light.


You’re stuck, like it or not—

A purely physical phenomenon.

You were asphyxiated by a false belief,

A blissful turtle experience.

That was our conversation.

“I don’t think there’s any single reality.

Something is practical if it helps you realize your goals.”

I want to seize fate by the throat,

But the world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and country clubs.

I want to be buried in a pine box, or no box at all.

No one can prove anything.



By: Jacob Adams

Existential Despair Comes Only to the Lonely

It might take longer than you think:

A shopping list, a bottle of unopened cleaner,

Financial pictures painted across outdated hard drives.

Drops of dishwater

Falling into the transcendental sea.

Will you die

Under the tyrannical wings of the ordinary,

With the Billboard Hot 100 trapped in your head?

A way of understanding:

You see through a glass.

Darkly, your soul surrenders to the moment.

But you were not invited.

You were held hostage.

A ragdoll left on the lawn to drown

In your own artificial irrigation,

Only to be picked up by a bright-eyed child

The morning after.

How to account for hope?


By: Jake Adams

there is a way to go

there’s a party upstairs

or a club

and an indeterminate number

of paranoid visions

dancing through this throbbing head

i ask them to

hold it down

they ask me to

prove my existence

i say

it’s getting harder every day

but i’ll try

i point out

friends who have taken the bus

out of town

only to reappear in fleeting dreams

are they any less real?

is there a difference

between leaving this city

and dying?

they shrug

and resume their noise-making

i make a grocery list

and listen to

the thunder rolling in



By: Jake Adams

Seattle, WA

Seattle, WA


* The tenth (and last) in a series of travelogue poems--poetic structure inspired by Charles Bukowski’s posthumous poem “come on in!”

welcome to this precipitous hill.

the beats blast from every undiscovered corner.

aging hipsters cling to their withered bus passes.

this is where my last poetic line will be

written.

the Americanos stream into each cup

like water through the Pugent

Sound.

we need to find a new truth and a new

direction.

we’re trapped here now

watching the perplexed tourists panting up the

incline.

my heart pounds to the certainties of

caffeinated overdose.

I stand up, walk it off, scratch

my head.

I’m a cup.

I am an overplayed song.

this precipitous hill welcomes you.

please come, but don’t stay too long!

there’s a life for you here,

poseur.

we have no motives to question but our own so

come sit with me at this uncomfortably crowded table.

it’s only two a.m.

here

four in Chicago.


By: Jake Adams

Portland, OR

* The ninth in a series of travelogue poems



Waiting for the rain to settle,

You told me that

We are not in need of stars


A forgone conclusion—


Into the black night

A quiet light glimmers from your eyes


By: Jake Adams

Bay Center, WA

* The eighth in a series of travelogue poems



Competing narratives of happiness fight for my heart,

As I sit upon the crags and sands of time,

Looking across the wide, anxious ocean,

Hoping for some revelation from above or resolution from within,

Instead hearing nothing but the sound

Of these vehement waves crashing against an apathetic shore.


By: Jake Adams

Forks, WA

* The seventh in a series of travelogue poems


Fourteen blood-suckers watch with amusement

As pale, middle-American tourists wander the streets

Searching for holy artifacts of the mighty story:

The T-shirts, the personalized key chains, the baseball caps;

The predators wait patiently until dark,

Searching for the appropriate moment

To remind the travellers they are pursuing more than fiction

By: Jake Adams

Port Angeles, WA

* The seventh in a series of travelogue poems


The splendor of Mount Olympus—

She dropped her pince-nez

In the icy, indifferent harbor



By: Jake Adams