Drew Gardner

Three poems

I Am So Stupid

Norman Mailer

Dividing My Time

I Am So Stupid

possibly as part of the whole “buy a car, buy a
kettle of the most expensive microphones in history” thing
I may have left out that at last I succeeded
in getting the phone number
of ancient beekeeping presences

no one has an address
I’m reminded of happiness,
a period of time in the self-created heaven of people
when the birds love me
the trees love me, all the whales
in the ocean love me
I don’t want to go!
in the filled-in darkness,
don’t be left behind
a hand rests upon my
heart machine,
but there’s this stupid thing — wisdom....

the garden will love me
the pollination will love me
that stupid girl from Sweden will love me
I can’t believe you slept with her

I need some of that sweet toxic love
pouring through my vernacular
how did I get so dumb? What’s wrong with me?
in the same way I love it, I also hate that I love it

I am so walking across a county
I am so stupid that I cannot rely on birds
I’d rather take a test

it’s no wonder the beekeeping operation is a
question that runs through my mind,
searing through my medulla oblongata
all my life I’ve fought against clarity....

I am a total loser taking royal jelly
in need of beekeeping and love and attention
cooking for people, looking at grasses
painting old stuff, hand-made snow, rain, hail
attachment is a signal from a tortoise

then the sea strikes with foamy terror
and a million bees can be upset
flying all around you,
enough to freak you out
and the stars step behind their fury


Norman Mailer

let’s just drop the whole thing
by finding a guitar to put on
I’m myself — again
I can’t teach anyone to do anything
statements in negative form
naked vehicles on display at the auto show
flower arrangements and chairs
the mafia hit list
let the world prepare
they have their hearts expended
many ways to “loosen up”
The Ford Motor Company
Webster’s flatlands
they let the mules
be executive editors
the buffalo pet
thought through to ourselves
and disease, that you would not let
them save

you save yourself and
never see her again in the story
let it out in armies
of the antiwar movement
or, as the future is behind us
couldn’t you find an instrument?

you vowed to use drugs
people showed up
in non-American clothes
you could form around yourself
from reading the waste products
of the authorities
today’s line — tell it to the passing coffin
let’s hope the charges are thrown out
let’s teleport and ask nicely
to go off on intelligence
so I put them to use and then to immersion
my parents are — what’s the phrase?
let’s start now
concentrate on your press card
they would not have let me in otherwise
coffins from coffin builders
they were able to
wonder where things went so wrong
put the value of a civil war
in solitary
let’s make something ugly
let’s enjoy the games


Dividing My Time

I truly hope that Gary Hart has better things to do than many other leaders in the spirit world, including the fact that they won’t let him go in on the Gary Hart holding patterns, the geographically distant objects we encounter here which happen to be correspondences between Boston and northern Vermont that have turned erotic — Gary Hart participants made into better prospects for committed other times though actually not nearly as good as “fear of commitment” times, which are have room for ferns, spiders and banana slugs to live.

We derive morality from Gary Hart to be the need to be the only democracy in the Muslim world between Boston and northern Vermont and its social disorder so that the social systems of the world crash into Oliver North again and again. In no way am I excluding Philadelphians from a better way to pull the plug on Gary Hart except that they want to interview me about what I mean: what we mean is that the Republic between Boston and northern Vermont is an Arab Marshall Plan, and Gary Hart is all of pre-W.W.II utopia-space.

I would like to go to the library and be replaced by something that works better. I can eliminate one of the world’s worst monsters because I know better than Gary Hart about what now is. Also how Gary Hart is the appropriate investigation into what we are left with as a joke when life’s options seem to have “spun down,” not Gary Hart as genuine desire to be banned from any Republic between an addressee or audience otherwise filled with the desire to be back somewhere — return home from being somewhere else for instance, in that not many automatic money machines are in the world, relatively speaking.

I feel like the phone lines were banned from our life together, what to do next when it’s not getting better, how to handle my order installations by asserting that I am a freelance scientist....

Gary Hart is paying for life as we are paying for it — by acknowledging (and backlogging) everything that has ever existed, exists or will exist, including the thought that you might feel the future in some threatening way that seems to imply you must surpass your own defensive mechanisms in an as-yet-unimagined counteractive recycling of counterproductive psychic space — this is the actual War on Terror — when we have such beings sucking trees and wildlife into the earth like a black hole banned from the Republic and Gary Hart is free speech, Gary Hart is elections ... not so hot ... not so necessary or as hot as Gary Hart. We are hotter than the hottest thing to have ever been created.