He Wants to Light a Kitchen Match and Immolate Himself

Hardest three weeks of my work year, I owe you (a blogroll culling and internment of the Blog Days of Summer's dead) links, a (not mine) poem, a song, in good news I splurged $1.75 on a kid's medicine dropper picked off a carousel of pill boxes next to the line of the pharmacy in the local Safeway, watercolor (red, blue, yellow only) dropped from above and rubbed around ruler's edges, pencil, no brushes, this is all I have to say (a lie! but all I'll bleggalblurt at you now while I talk myself down from stupidass ambitions)

That my birthday - see Sunday's post - falls during the single hardest work week of my year is reason #436 I'm not an atheist
One in six tree species in US in danger of extinction
Life w/o Water				Life with water
Greenland ice melt will raise sea levels a foot
The Fed's inflation plan is class war
Recovering a radical tradition of cultural critique
How the physics of nothing underlies everything
It's a good thing a rival billionaire in Premier League Billionaire doesn't own the Washington Post, meant both sarcastically and not
Maggie's weekly				Mythical Trucker
Avedon Carol's occasional links!
Twelve-and-a-half tales of baffling wonder-terror
ELKIN!		MOROSE!		{ feuilleton }'s weekly
Survive an assassination attempt, win the Lit Nobel! is one fine effing metaphor for lots
Living in sci-fi world				Living in material world
New Botch song (should you like mathcore)
New Bernadette Mayer collection arriving November, pre-ordered, yo
New Krasznahorkai novella arriving late September, pre-ordered
New Mdou Moctar EP (should you, and you should, like Moctar)
Zoe played my favorite Martha and Muffins early this morning

THE AMBITION BIRD

Anne Sexton

So it has come to this –

insomnia at 3:15 A.M.,

the clock tolling its engine

 

like a frog following

a sundial yet having an electric

seizure at the quarter hour.

 

The business of words keeps me awake.

I am drinking cocoa,

the warm brown mama.

 

I would like a simple life

yet all night I am laying

poems away in a long box.

 

It is my immortality box,

my lay-away plan,

my coffin.

 

All night dark wings

flopping in my heart.

Each an ambition bird.

 

The bird wants to be dropped

from a high place like Tallahatchie Bridge.

 

He wants to light a kitchen match

and immolate himself.

 

He wants to fly into the hand of Michelangelo

and come out painted on a ceiling.

 

He wants to pierce the hornet’s nest

and come out with a long godhead.

 

He wants to take bread and wine

and bring forth a man happily floating in the Caribbean.

 

He wants to be pressed out like a key

so he can unlock the Magi.

 

He wants to take leave among strangers

passing out bits of his heart like hors d’oeuvres.

 

He wants to die changing his clothes

and bolt for the sun like a diamond.

 

He wants, I want.

Dear God, wouldn’t it be

good enough just to drink cocoa?

 

I must get a new bird

and a new immortality box.

There is folly enough inside this one.