‘Poets and pornographers’ and other poems
by Alex Leigh Farber
The poets and the pornographers
meet in the same place
every night—
after the city has emptied out.
Neither tourists nor police
can tell them apart.
In fact—
the poets and the pornographers
can barely tell each other apart,
let alone notice the absurdity
that brought them here.
The pornographers bring the cognac. The poets, the cigars.
It’s been this way longer than anyone remembers.
Anything that happens
between midnight and dawn
is judged
case by case.
They laugh at each other’s
faults, compulsions,
nervous tics.
They admire
the same women and men.
They mix freely.
Judge solely on moral grounds.
Enjoy the missing hollows of each—
sometimes crawling inside.
They pair up,
make love,
spend days, weeks, years,
split apart,
recombine,
without wisdom,
without madness.
Only the pornographers lament
the passing of time.
The poets invite it—
gray hair, wrinkled skin,
sagging bellies.
The poets and the pornographers
repeat, repeat, repeat—
all the same mistakes
over and over again—
proudly.
Often
they cannot tell
who is who,
what is what,
where they were last year,
or even
this morning.
(They switch sides
all the time.)
They keep their secrets.
Agree to no memory.
Fight each other to the death.
Laugh at the rotting body’s nakedness.
Weep at the rising sun.
Think everything of traffic,
and rain.
And meet—
the same place,
the same time,
each and every night.
But I’ll never tell you where.
Feathered Gun
Placed in your cool gaze,
it explodes —
ice and nails
fired in only one direction.
You shoot again
and again,
trying to finish the sabbath wine
while faces at the round table
rearrange with their serfdom:
bodies grow younger, stronger,
forget their shackles,
eat with paws,
wait for vanity to be belched.
Rain-and-rose country
cradle the muzzle,—
fingers slipping through your grandmother’s wedding ring
into your daughter’s hand.
Everything veins into dancing embers.
A gun is a promise—
friend, lover, attorney, accountant.
Someday you’ll know
you carved the house inside you
from a climbing tree,
wrote these rules in the forest.
You kneel to dyed sheets,
twist on the curtain—
an altar that takes
and never forgives.
A kinder god than you
raises the rusty trigger to the sky.
It wears the life you were sold:
never to grow old.
Images and sounds regret you
with each barbaric push
through the pinhole
of a single life.
Pull.
Each moment you die
a different way.
Your soul slips
into the white tigers
your grandfather kept
in a book
at his kitchen table.
As the smoking shell ejects
from his loving,
unfiltered
cigarette smile.
The Map Is Everything Between
I wake up
find myself writing:
I don’t even recognize you anymore.
But how can I blame you
for letting the world finally
take you?
Not even you
could be strong enough
to withstand this—
you once said to me,
and now I say back
to the corner
where you used to be,
not listening to me.
I’m not sure if I’m raging
at you or the world
or if there is an actual difference
in my heart and mind.
It’s not like most things,
it’s not “a little bit of both.”
This time it must be:
agree to the terms or
we start throwing bodies
of the hostages
onto the tarmac.
In simplest terms:
we’re in the desert,
there’s only one bottle of water,
and if we split it,
we both die.
And so you choose my body—
though you’ve only touched it once
in the last decade—
and that was the bliss
of pleasure and pain,
blood and orgasm.
And the map is everything between.
So we come to
what we love,
Ray-Bans on the bridge of our nose,
stare each other in the face
at a funeral with your husband
between us,
watch it transform
like jello in bowls,
God’s grand design
in the red desert night.
We were born to understand
and then get lost,
not realizing we were just
meant to return home.
The moment of changing—until the love,
the betrayal,
the forgiveness,
the oblivion dance
we all must dance—
the blinded Tristan eyes,
the folded Isolde crown,
just before the mortal wound
of separation
shifts the car into sixth gear,
and away we go again,
top down,
Across the Mojave
To the biggest thermometer
In the world
Just to say we did it.
Zurich
You went to Zurich
to watch them rewrite history
in the glass house above you.
Nazis in business casual,
playing neutrality
like buskers on a beach.
Your half-dead rival danced in their glow,
borrowing your soul for a while
like he borrowed your fiancée,
his laugh still echoing
over sour Swiss meat,
Art Deco neon plastic.
Half-shaved, sutured head,
he peddled his rental bike
like a tour champion
through gassen
to Credit Suisse.
You had to hold him to hate him,
stop his donuts and burnouts
tearing through Kunsthaus halls.
Always sunk the boats
to walk bridges barefoot in his wake,
writing together
with a goose’s bill
dipped in hotel coffee.
But in the glass house
your reflection cracked—
he left you,
heaven his excuse,
a six-foot village girl
his absolution.
Just your tour guide
through the blonde film festival,
plagiarized from America.
Nothing in America
left to plagiarize.
So you waited, half-balding
with the children,
because you were one,
are one,
will always be one,
your wages of fear burned out
on trinkets
and duty-free wine,
while You Bet Your Life
screened
across Lake Zurich.
Hamlet’s Eyes
And so we come
to what we love—
the center,
the deepest well,
the hollow excavated
to be buried again,
avoided,
wrapped in plague,
biblical booby trap
that can never be penetrated
by cock or pussy,
the suckled nipple,
the giggle of more.
Feel it transform—
a prison of golden
bars growing as roots
from inside out,
from womb to balls,
tits to ass.
A grand design.
Instinct to worship.
Celebrate.
Confine.
Kill.
The moment—
of death,
of change.
The butterfly explodes
into the molten flower.
Hamlet’s eyes
staring down
at Ophelia,
for the body he will
know again,
and diving in—
Romeo morphed Narcissus,
full force
to what he truly loved.
Alone
with the pistil’s poison.
Alex Leigh Farber is a private poet and writer. After living on both coasts and places in between, he now resides in Pennsylvania, where he mentors, teaches, and writes. His work blends experimental forms and mythic undercurrents with intimate explorations of memory, desire, and human (dis)connection.
Note from the editor:
Hey there, it’s Kate Tsurkan, editor-in-chief. Literary magazines like Apofenie are able to remain up and running first and foremost thanks to the support of their readers. Please consider becoming a paid member today and helping our community grow.
