Lucas Boelter

Casket

Out of the casket I broke
A walking, talking thing. 
I stood upright, the hair of a gypsie
Undertaker asleep on a handful of
Silver. This is Dolly’s graveyard,
Where she fell like a broken horse,
And neighed “Ubermensch” all the way down. 
 
To keep a crystal frozen in blood, like a
Hard heart stuck awake in the night. Dolly
Came from Arkansas, and in the street curb
Sought a loneliness most enlightening. Dark,
Like a faraway ox, she saw a hell in protrusions,
The curb symbolizing the outward nature of things
Forever at the bank of her river, an unsettling fish. 
 
She was disgusted with the painters and mongers,
To whom death blossomed forth the endless stroking
Of pale hands on watery faces. She looked at the tree
And tried to stretch her neck around the top branch,
For in stretching the neck the earth booms like a
Tunnel, and the fields break water and capture
light on soothing knees – knees meant to touch
fellow space-travelers, who spin about, shouting,
“Life is alive! Life is alive!”
 
This casket, the back seat of a Pontiac,
The roaring space between fingers, the
Dead neck on a thigh, it is a brain’s
Sandy gulley, equipped with a man
Who likes throwing sand. Be without
The dirt – ladies, gentlemen. Though, one
Wishes to suck the back of the moon and absorb
A bit of heaven. 

---

Pale Grass

                  After Heather Cristle’s “The Actual Future” OR Thanks to Heather Cristle

you are a pendulum            I am the breed of necrophiliac
pale women cling to         before they utter ghost in the
muddy grass                     then clouds want to tick
through dawns       for orange is their transfusion      and I
touch no dark                       so also I can’t permeate green
fields                                     soon I’ll lay aside the boughs
of their soaking lungs        the corporeal tick    when I climb
into the dawn                   and have to disembody clouds to
flay into fields. 

---

Mother Nature

Several nights I have awoken
afraid of the clouds, the eclipses, and
the stars to whom my body honors.
I’ll tell you this: my cells sometimes
awaken in a daze, blue in the face
and pouncing.  There are no constraints.
Nothing can be done.
 
The worst are the births.  Each star
finds its pore and I gain spots.  Am
sort of an inverted leopard.  This is
how the world turns, believe it or not.
I could try to tear them away,
but they’re leaches, these stars.
 
You see, most things come from my skin.
It is bloody.  There is blood.  I awaken,
shrieking at the flagrant night, the cotton
walls – they are my gauze.  And, thereupon,
in the morning, nestled at my side,
 
ripped like a slug, a beetle, a grasshopper,
 
is an angel, warm, wet, new-born – yes,
I am mother to the mystical as well.
 
That is some nights.  Others are head-banged
on gauze, feeling for my throat, shaking at
stars, at eclipses, at bulging clouds.
 
Then it’s at my temples, at my sides,
a pulse, a crick at the spine,
and calm, dear, calm.



--
Lucas Boelter, an alumn of Lewis University, hates religion and capitalism more than anything, and feels his poetry works to undermine the social, moral, and intellectual constructs that enslave and alienate us. His personal ambition is to spread the teachings of Marx and to elevate the human-being to his and her proper place above abstract measures of worth, namely the dollar. To emancipate ourselves from the bounds of our fabrications, to bring about a proletariat revolution that will ultimately result in humanity’s full realization of itself -- these are the paramount goals of our age, and we must each one of us strive to eliminate all that obstructs our path to them. “Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.” Let live the revolution!