The Blues are Uppers, Then They Aren’t by Jake Bailey

Pill’s to chill in cooled iridescence,

fucker’s been following me

for what seems like forever,

has a hatchet chip-chopping

at the backs of my ankles and we turn

up the volume,

beat’s got a sound like shredded snow

shiver shaking in solemnity,

can’t bite it back,

can’t break it off,

collapsing from cauterized catastrophe

baking in broken bastards,

bile’s spit up in streaking spires,

shut it off,

that awful screeching,

emanates from owls owned by errant owners,

doesn’t give a shit about crystallized cacophony,

caresses who cares,

can’t quite recall what I’m doing here,

done dialing a number I can’t reach,

reeling from realism’s decline,

decimated deified degeneration,

it dances in dawn’s subtle grace

and sanctifies the sanctimonious’ shot

up on hallowed ground,

their zombies rise like fresh bread,

better off dead, better off dead,

take a blue one for me.

Jake Bailey is a schizotypal confessionalist in Antioch University Los Angeles’ MFA program. He has forthcoming work in The Laurel Review and Flypaper Magazine and has been published in The Esthetic Apostle and Prairie Light Review. He is also an associate editor for Lunch Ticket and lives in Chicago with his girlfriend and three dogs.

#poetry #issue1 #JakeBailey