Jake Romm
| O enemy, please Would you loosen your grip On our throats so that we might choke Out one final curse? O enemy, floating as you are Above the flood of your making, Warmed as you are by the fires Of your making. O enemy, you see Our despair blooming Like a wound, our veins Opening in reverse O enemy, coward, Don’t you know that Love and loss are just The fertilizer for life? Oozing with black, your favorite’s words Etched in grooves on hardening plastic– O enemy, one day you will be The medium and the audience of rage. O enemy, your heart, your blood. Your blood is not our blood Your heart is not our heart, Your mighty rivers of plasma Where doors are shut And windows are shut Where behind shut doors More doors are shut. O enemy, O enemy, your life will end In bloodless rooms, in anterooms Of gold, O enemy, our opposite, Perhaps we will never die While you hoard death Like a luxury, O enemy, Your great banks of marble, your great Vaults of marble stuffed full of peace. Our bodies shudders with pleasure At the thought of a gun / Our fingers go slack At the touch of steel. | O enemy, you’ve taken the best Of us and yet it is no source Of pride that one day You will take us too. O enemy, listen please. Can you hear the soft Sinews of our trigger-fingers Twitching in repose? And call it hope, O enemy, You call it hope in order to name it, To bring it under your heading, To write it in your ledger. O enemy, coward, you Bury your lilyheads In the tar-sands and Plug your ears O enemy, O country, I have no country, My country is no country, and so My countrymen are everywhere. Boast a different tint, your odor Saccharine rises from Behind gates and walls And homes from rooms You’ve shut your doors. Open your doors So we may come in and feast On this century instead of meat. O enemy, our opposite, Perhaps we are condemned To fetid life listening To the retching of the earth O enemy, we write our provocations Because we cannot swing a sword Because it’s not our necks On the block, not yet, because O comrades, O countrymen, I’m sorry that a poem is not a gun / A poem is a failure To fulfill the promise of poetry. |
Jake Romm’s writing and photography have appeared in Aesthetica Magazine [Creative Writing Prize Shortlist (Poetry)], Inkstick Media, The New Inquiry, Hyperallergic, Protean Magazine, MAP6, Yogurt Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Midnight Sun, Reading The Pictures, and elsewhere. He can be found on twitter at @jake_romm.
