Four Poems by John Deming

Rhapsody in Rat

 

Rats know when you’re watching them.
Yeah, so I’m smoking on the fire escape
overlooking the alley, and rats
fleck in and out, as they do,
and I look with pure fury
at a rat maybe fifty yards off,
its furry back, thick tail
and burning oven of pursuit,
and it is not even facing me
but freezes then sprints
through a brick wall. The rat
ran through a brick wall.
Rats can feel you looking at them.
I’ve tested this enough.

 

Otherwise, I guess I’d say things
have been pretty good, same thing,
been foraging out and again
outside my body like the primate
on the lab poster, and in spite
of all desire to stall, persisting
in a spirit of worship for whatever
dark thing lives alone at the bottom
of the ocean, some galvanized
young whale planted in the mind
the whole time, the sky winking over
saying oh yeah, there you are,
grow a more determined squint,
remember that nature doesn’t forgive.

 

Hard Times for a Cockroach

 

hard times for a cockroach
today they killed the cockroach kings

an hour later killed the queen
hard times for a cockroach

blaming things for being what they are
we’ve been working on this problem

 

The Audience Will End Before the Symphony

For Marc Maron

 

If you read someone else’s great line in a dream
and wake up and realize they never wrote it,

is it yours? On Marc’s podcast, he says
this morning, he heard a last voice saying

“The audience will end before the symphony.”
If the audience ends before the symphony,

then a symphony doesn’t require an audience
in order to proceed as a symphony but is forced

to experience itself as a lost thing. Maybe the decline
begins the day after you’ve dusted a thing

for the last time. In the same episode, he jokes
that fossil fuels trapped in the sky are “the revenge

of the dinosaurs.” Dead things really did ripen
into oil after they died, so the audience ends

before the symphony because the audience
becomes the symphony. The wallpaper

absorbs it like nicotine with the thousands
of forgotten symphonies you’ve played in your mind,

the isolated audience for all of it, stuck there
even as you thought you’d made your way

out the lobby doors and into the dark,
saying what a cold night, glancing towards

the visible stars, thinking you still had time.
Dinosaurs, like people, have bunkers in their minds.

 

Further Squinting

 

Then more sand in the eye,
whole hours slipped and forgotten,

and somewhere, at some measure
folded in them the knowledge

god would be drunk, if there
were a god. She, he or it

would be tired, slurring fuck it,
make a villain out of me.

 

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John Deming is author of the poetry book Headline News (Indolent Books 2018). His work has appeared in Boston Review, New Orleans Review, Fence and other publications. He lives in New York City and teaches at LIM College.

These four poems will be featured in LIT #33, forthcoming in 2021.