Leveler Poetry Journal
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Rob Delaney

 

Hi, I am Rob Delaney.

I am not Rob Delaney

 

and he would never begin a five-minute set like that,

but before California dangled blackberries

above my granite mouth,

 

Rob showed us the way and the truth and the life

(John fourteen-six by the score of silent thumbs)

 

god, twitter fame was the only thing

that could bring us nearer gods we don’t believe in

 

this big bang of a perpetually expanding following

we cannot fully understand

 

by choice I never listened to robins

conducting high-frequency symphonies

 

(but I did read Last Call of the Passenger Pigeon

by Daniel A. Hoyt that summer

and could form the parentheses of a whistle

enough to calculate the slow kettle of tea)

 

my father would sit on a pig stump

(an oak whose life he ended himself)

and watch birds fly the superhighway,

clouds like rush hour in L.A.

 

like some hippie saint claiming

all that is God

is not man-made

 

I always thought of bird-watching as a way

for the elderly to augment their loneliness

 

now all the young men I know

fetishize loneliness in themselves




James Croal Jackson