Pomp Poetry: Wishful Weekends

Lately, my weekdays have been nauseous with deadlines, applications, schoolwork and other measures to ensure I’m not homeless come June.

As a break from my overcaffeinated workweek, I switched to liquor for the weekend.
On Friday, Whiskey, Diet Coke and I had a glorious reunion. It was at a party downtown with chandeliers and Courvoisier, two c-words that enter my vocabulary with much less frequency than “Colt 45” or “Cunt Circus.”

The night ended with intense PDA in the Union Square station, followed by falling asleep without sheets on my bed.
On Saturday, I woke up at 4 p.m. with a headache, wrote a Political Science paper and ate an Ess-a-Bagel. Then I got on the L to Bushwick, to meet Royal at Café Orwell for the Crowd reading series.

I’m a poet who typically hates poetry readings. But I like wine, and Crowd has a lot of it. This time around, they also had a bottle of Tequila and a poet with a cool name: Macgregor Card. He also edits The Germ.


I could attribute my fondness for Card’s poetry to his stage presence, his spasmodic delivery (does he not know all poets are required to speak in pretentious monotones?), the liquor in my system, or the fact that he’s from Brooklyn. But his poems were also the most idiosyncratic and fun (consequently, the only ones I remember).
He’s one of those poets you can enjoy line-by-line or stanza-by-stanza. “Spasmodic Tragedy” had a lot of short ones, like:
“It doesn’t take a jerk
to lose count in the dark
to jerk off all the lights
everywhere I shiver”

and

“I came to you
in hope that lights need
screwing down a hall
beauty of a ladder on all fours
everywhere at once”

Another Card poem I enjoyed was called…”Poem”:

I crow the verdant lake surf, crow
Can’t deseltzer lake of tourists into reed regatas
Out-disturb supposed gull, ex-garralous tit
Can’t resolve to cleat the former wild familiar neck
A call for drastic woolly cadillac to ease
A load of cans into estate-pie, hurry
Beach the silver and stunt-silver
Be like painter, nature’s own subultimate decider
Hang it on the beach, an actual sober beach
Where is she at, auratic solemnpuss my love
As all best cameos enfronded
Far from single hitch of my decelerrating tug
The surf I crow, self-prickery’s rushed sum
Of reasonable tics, stroke, stroke, stroke
And crow, stroke and actually crow
Like tourist through like travelled recitation, crow

On Sunday, I needed a sober beach. I drank a lot of water and wrote internship cover letters. I met Daniel at work and we ate French food. I prayed that the weekend could be just a weekend longer.

I woke up in Brooklyn to a Mazzy Star ringtone, reluctantly ready for another Monday.

-Hannah Miet