"Flotation Device" by Bill Rasmovicz

[audio mp3="http://barnstormjournal.org/content/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Flotation-Device-bill.mp3"][/audio]When I say body I mean buoy.By clouds, the television taste of saffron infused lobster mousse,pop stars lonely as fuck in the milky penthouse haze of theirelevator-only access upside-down oubliettes.That real, yes.Real as consequence.Real as real consternation is a conflagration of the senses,beyond attrition and algorithm.Late fall, November feels full of ghosts.I keep thinking about this girl: it's summer and she gets stungby a beeand her throat flowers up into a kind of meat geranium.I don't know why.That guy who lost his taste buds though, lucky.The guy who thought his reflexes were faster than the animal trap,not so much.It's unclear, should we stuff oranges in the enemy's muffler,or just run?Is the orange supposed to remind us of a good-willing sun whilethe wind's always imported from somewhere else,its oxygen fundament and still rusting us?And I'm not much for sunsets all nostalgic and sad, but the dawnnever ceases to amaze.Then the day progresses into talk of brown-outs, boil-overs and kidsWailing that they have to leave the playgroundand I wonder how we'll appear afterwards,recovered under the risen sea with the brick horse stablespliced in the stainless steel condominium,our mesh running shoes baitdangling from the telephone wire.Leverage, it turns out, is not moving the planets with a long-enoughapparatus, it's converting your risk into my reward.Bottom line: we're all taxidermy eventually,that now would've been the time to make a bunker out ofthe grand piano, at least paint the architrave a butteryhue to offset the Benedictine coolnessof all the grey and blueas thusly we continue, a mind a matter to be overcomewhile matter edges onward, mind all its own.Bill Rasmovicz is the author of three books of poetry The World in Place of Itself (Alice James Books), Gross Ardor (42 Miles Press), and his newest collection Idiopaths was released earlier this month from Brooklyn Arts Press. A pharmacist, Bill has also served as a workshop co-leader and literary excursionist throughout much of Europe. A graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program, his current home is Brooklyn.