A new poem by Josiah Morgan.

For Dennis

I thought for a long time my life
too ugly to make beautiful: the
older men, the gold coins, the
clattering of empty plates,
seeking comfort in Oliver!, in
The Sound of Music, never
questioned that there was
darkness in the world, took that
as read, like Springsteen, but missed that
often ugliness and beauty were the same
thing. That changed with After School,
Street Football, Eighth Grade, Dennis
Cooper, writing about “one guy / sprawled /
fifty feet away, sexy, but he was / dead,
blood like lipstick” I didn’t even pick up
back then that the fifty feet were of poetry
as much as distance.
Paris, New Zealand, Dennis, Josiah, I was
shocked, suddenly I could speak, my
wounds didn’t look like wounds but
monuments or structures. I resisted pain in
other people and still do, preferring the
monument to the blood, like Dennis, it all
rushed out at once, my teenage crush on
Rupert Brooke, his handsome face and
end-rhyme, and Finnegans Wake, and
Nabokov, Pale Fire, that great book about
misreading, and the misreading, Wuthering
Heights, New Juche, Woolf, O’Hara,
Bishop. Wordsworth’s Prelude in both its
versions on Lincoln Road, reading it over a
custard square, sometimes you read poetry
and sometimes poetry reads you.

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