Poetry: ON ONE MAN’S SUCCESS AND FAILURE OUTSIDE THE HOUSE OF BLAH by Michael Trocchia
Michael Trocchia’s poem plays with wonderful absurdity, with “gross splendor” from every angle—crafting an esthetic relaxation where the profound dances gracefully in your peripheral vision. “One Man’s Success and Failure” is a triumph of blah.
ON ONE MAN’S SUCCESS AND FAILURE OUTSIDE THE HOUSE OF BLAH
I’ve brought you thin coats, false
arms, old keyboards, ribbons of love
letters. And I’ve still to carry buckets
of mud, gross splendor from which
to make ache and bath. But I’ve lips
curved like passages that end in dirt
or delight, and a neck thickening
in the collar of all this white
space. I have only to count
the tongues I’ll take you to: one, two…
no, six, or ten feet of boys running in place
of what slows down the beast. Measure me
with a smile stretched into unshaved
time, or come in with a crowd
of knuckles pushing at the poised
head. I’ve rings, I tell you, that, pressed
into fine flesh, carve a good crown of light
red. I say it freely, for I have earned
my pomp and coin. I have butchered up
the wind in a man’s heart, slid speech
away from the house of blah, made not
just the single vein rot in its skin. But above
all, I have to say I’ve gone into something
outside it, a thing kicked in on all sides,
no sky nor ground to it, just damned
atmosphere, acting its part out, waving
the full darkness like all of life’s dead
hair, pulled up and down, until long
days and short come clogged
with it, or until I, arriving at the age
of this age, am kindly brushed aside.
Michael Trocchia
Michael Trocchia's poems and prose have appeared in journals such as Asheville Poetry Review, Black Sun Lit, Boiler Journal, Colorado Review, Fourteen Hills, Mid-American Review, and Tarpaulin Sky. He is the author of The Fatherlands, a chapbook of prose poems and surreal fictions, and Unfounded, a collection of poems. Mortals in the Making, a chapbook of poems, will appear in early 2019 from Finishing Line Press. He lives in Virginia, where he teaches philosophy and works in the library at James Madison University.
