The first poem in Leonard Cohen’s posthumous book The Flame made me laugh. Not because the lyrics are especially funny (although there are touches of Cohen’s characteristic wry humor), and not because the poem is foolish (it’s quite good), but because it is practically a medley of every single theme and obsession Cohen took up over his sixty-year career. Holiness and pussies are just a start. One almost senses him (knowingly, always knowingly) ticking off boxes. Angels and devils: check. Art, sartorial elegance, and slaves: check, check, check. Messianism: check:
No car to drive to the dump and too embarrassed to borrow one, you scrape the black mold off the underside as best you can, muscle it onto your shoulder. Spores multiplied to the size
After pulling a score from the dumpster behind Krogers I stroll through sliding doors with egg-caked hands. The greeter greets me as I pass. I scan the aisles like a surgeon studying the mint
I want my web to hold. I want to repair what I have made. I was not given the gold hive. In me seethes the silk of invisible worlds. Spinning my body inside of hairline emptiness, I project
In the evenings, we watched Jeopardy. Wore surgical masks once she got sick. Before that my mother sent me to the store for cigarettes all the time. Pack of Salem Lights.
Daddy was a slick devil, so he must have thought my sister his succubus; a mud-bone Lilith, her lurid tresses struck shut with igneous flicker when it happened in the black. His cinereous
peepers, glazed over moons which pierced through Tweety Bird jammies. He tended to sissy’s unassuming sinew with his eyes first so as to handle the unfathered clitoris with the only sort of care
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