You are on page 1of 9

april 1 2013 the eruditism of early april is appallingly obvious this 12 hour livestream of 2 individuals reading the descriptions

of randomly selected youtube videos is a welcome reminder that absurdity can be entertaining/humorous give me one second to nish setting up my laptop speakers in my windows i am going to shout these poems at passers-by at the fullest human volume april 2 2013 at work i softly remind myself that contentment is just a theory today is the rst day in months i have not felt the compulsion to wear a black beanie outside this is one more piece of evidence leading from theory to axiom april 3 2013 it is 12:45am and i am reading about typhus the 1918 spanish u killed more people in one year than the black death did in a century river blindness is being eradicated in burkina faso by researchers offering themselves as live bait i am endlessly conscious of camus's conclusion at the end of the plague there is so much to admire in other people; if you need help remembering this nudge your thoughts in the direction of those men with self-induced onchocerciasis april 4 2013 this is the slight depression of an empty stairwell: any stairwell over 4 ights that is devoid of your voice the vibrations in the handrails should remind you of the opening bass line of your favorite dance song the view out the window should be worth $3000 at that new art gallery down the street when i listen to you i understand the insecurities of every up-and-coming art theorist april 5 2013 i have decided to take better care of myself i want to look in the mirror and remember my jawline i will think about how many times i have been complimented on the skills of my kissing i will remember that the pain in my chest is a reminder to keep my lungs accountable in my lungs in my lungs in my god damn lungs is a skin cell from every person i have loved

april 6 2013 a few thoughts i have in the lobby of an urgent care clinic: if i die in this waiting room please dont let "photograph" by nickelback still be playing how odd that the last thing i might see is a spanish-language soap opera with russian subtitles i hope my friends dont remember me as the dead guy they drove to a funeral home in the back of a ! used honda accord april 7 2013 there is something to be said about only listening to fall out boy after 2:30am i have made this a rule and my life has been vastly different ever since this decision a recent discovery: i am happiest when it is raining and/or i am skateboarding april 8 2013 late at night i often imagine i am camping the quiet hum of my refrigerator is a nearby stream, bursting with salmon the christmas lights strung underneath my bed could almost be constellations with half-closed eyes i lean back and imagine central washington, the columbia gorge, glacier ! national park "naturalist" is never a word i would use to describe myself with that in mind, how do i explain this recurring dream where i set up tents but choose to sleep ! outside? april 9 2013 a secret hope of mine is to see a cynical message on a fast-food reader board "eat here if you want. doesnt matter." nothing tastes better than blatant honesty rst thing in the morning april 10 2013 i imagine myself upside down in the reection off a wet camera lens distorted, i am photographed like the leaf stuck to the bottom of my running shoes develop me with the toxic chemicals on sidewalks the morning of july 5th like the bottle rocket burns on my wrists i turn out smooth and faded

april 11 2013 i miss the fohawk i had when i was 13 i am longing for the pains in our hands in the movie theater after i wrote you a love poem on the inside of your sister's old pink converse high tops april 12 2013 lately i have been working on not treating time as consisting of objective limiting periods of ! measurement but instead thinking of it as uid, arbitrary, able to shift at any moment the hour it takes to listen to the newly-leaked album of my favorite band is irrelevant the seconds in between the crushing of my lungs as i jump naked into a glacial lake and their ! stabbing reincarnation as i icily resurface are immeasurable the years i have spent replaying the time i said "that's it?" after you rst kissed me in the basement ! seem like centuries and seconds that i will never gure out april 13 2013 i have been using my cardboard cutout of c3p0 from star wars episode 1: the phantom menace as a ! hat holder for around 3 years my relationship with this ctional droid is like the complicated knots in your post-running hair i love this character with the unabashed abandon of a rst-grader who asked to have a rat-tail for his ! birthday this constant conjunction of our past existences, on a monthly basis, deserves a devoted fan base as well as the merchandising opportunities of a wool blanket over our heads with star wars episode 4: ! a new hope gently ignored in the background april 14 2013 "david hume" is written on the back of my hand in fresh black ink what is this, if not a skin-tight promise of my god-given skepticism? let me read you a bedtime story about the absurdity of causes and effects let me lull you to sleep with the voice i used last night in the lobby of the broken library elevator let me convince your eyelids that looking at mirrors forever is a worthwhile endeavor and that my only daily surety is the delicacy of your ngers on acid-free paper

april 15 2013 quiet whispers of normalcy into a peaking microphone set to rockabilly reverb hushed murmurs of dissension in the subtext of every unwritten letter to the editor silent repetition of god works in mysterious ways in the back left corner desk of this philosophy class gentle reminders of love is a virtue written in the new red stains on my only towel april 16 2013 i split my lip with complete condence in my ability to mask my nerves i once dated a girl whose upper lip was scarred into distinct hemispheres she had run into a swing set and bled all over her favorite shirt more than a year after we started ! dating pictures of hospitals in central oregon will always evoke memories of my stitches being pulled out because of this the skin on my face clings slightly tighter than hers because of this i try daily to create a perfect semicircle in the air to throw me into future seconds april 17 2013 thank god i am not the ugliest person on omegle tonight my largest claim to fame is a ve second conversation with soulja boy on chatroulette what does it say about our unconscious cultural mindset when i am sad that 70% of my conversational partners click past me even faster than soulja boy did thank god for the occasional 30% who validate my online existence during these weeks of insomnia april 18 2013 this is my rst time listening to the boston police scanner the radio silence coincides with my bated breath i refresh the feed and hear only bursts of quick static my roommate keeps waking up, "i keep hearing gunshots," he says "not yet, man." this is what i respond, sad

april 19 2013 when i go to sleep my head is full of ames the elliott smith song "alameda" reminds me of my least-favorite ex girlfriend i am somewhere in grant park emptying cans of paint on a popular sidewalk welcome to my representation of the words of a man who stabbed himself twice in the chest with a ! kitchen knife april 20 2013 i experience a life-changing realization while upside down for a split second in this bouncy castle it promptly ees my mind when i remake contact with the overinated plastic beneath me april 21 2013 i challenge every unt skinny 19 year-old guy to a wrestling match a guarantee of the outcome: i will win my condence is unshaken, it is time to 'get down on the mats' april 22 2013 a list of various roofs i have been on: my parents' house: alone on the 4th of july, lawn chair on the precipice my cousins' neighbor's: a third grader falling asleep while playing hide and seek my grandparents': gallons of paint, an ipa, my father's ipad, my mother's silent reectivity "the palace": for 5 minutes of a birthday party, sitting on a chimney throwing bottles like reies into the street elementary school gymnasium: after work on a thursday i burn the dry leaves in the gutter with the butt of my rst cigarette semi-operational warehouse in the manufacturing district: my phone is broken so i cannot take a picture of the view, a city in decline made beautiful by the grafti in its small, quiet corners church in eastern oregon: the snow turns my hands red then blue, i will achieve the whole color spectrum given enough time to insert myself in the clouds

april 23 2013 there must be some hidden message in the sped up morse code of the unexplained tapping on my ! ceiling every night something must account for my apparent skill to be friends with the kind of people who write "hail ! satan" with sharpie on the tags in their backpacks what is the odd look hiding in the corners of your mouth in that instant at the end of a deep exhale? it is only after nding the explanation for these questions that i can begin to accept the enigmatic ! words hiding just under the skin on the back of my neck april 24 2013 i have 6 unread text messages they will remain mysteries to me as long as the touchscreen on my phone is broken the ambiguity in tone and meaning inherent in this form of communication reminds me of gustav ! aubert's parrot(s) these texts will decay like a single macaw feather under my shoes in a dusty museum attic and i am left fumbling at the screen, pockmarked as if it is a statue of a forgotten author in a forgotten ! town square april 25 2013 this moment feels like the time i saw a cat get run over by a ford f150 supercab we are crying and we are kissing and the cat had a seizure right there on the road it is something i still think about and it hurts sometimes to remember what i left on the pavement as you drove away i wanted to jump in your open window and save that cat he is dead but we dodged the truck and i am in your arms and i am kissing you where every cat runs when he is run over by a man in a baseball cap april 26 2013 this picture of you from high school from the year you spent in planes between new york and newport is either an early june atlantic sun rising or a late august pacic sun setting like the ambiguity of your midnight text messages i am lost trying to gure you out

april 27 2013 i treat portland like it is a small town and i am its mayor in absentia i walk downtown with the self-conscious swagger of joshua reynold's 18th century self-portraits i am home for the weekend and ready to trash the art museum again as the owner of the stretch of hawthorne blvd. between 55th and 39th avenues, i feel safe in my assertion that every inch of concrete here is in love with the weight of your soles april 28 2013 today i felt an urge to skateboard down a hill as fast as possible i would be wearing cut-offs and a white t-shirt with your face spray painted on the front the hill would be long, medium steepness, moderately smooth with gravelly patches near the bottom my board would catch on the lip of a manhole cover i would tumble off, my momentum carrying me ve feet through the air onto the concrete below my shorts would rip more; my shirt would bloody up; my palms turn to gravel i am softly screaming in my head at the bottom of the hill and my shoes are bloody but they were already red so you don't notice me and walk away whistling april 29 2013 i wrote this poem while playing video games this is the art form of the future: writing poems in virtual environments i am the poet laureate of dystopian online ash games you will read my work in shitty tunnel grafti tributes by angsty 13 year-olds the day they turn eliot's "the wasteland" into pixels is the day fresh air becomes a platonic ideal april 30 2013 if i tweet often enough and with the full force of my temerity maybe my soul will become binary and retweetable this is a common sentiment for my trembling synapses at 2am when my shoelaces nally wear through

thank you so much for reading.


april, 2013 is a collection of poems i wrote every day in the month of april. the poems were inspired by snapshots of images or memories i had on each of those days; i wrote them to help me remember what i might otherwise forget. april, 2013 is the fourth release in a longer project, in which i am releasing similar collections of poetry at the end of every month in 2013. the reasons are twofold: to keep a strong, specic motivation for poetry writing and to provide a space to improve the quality of my writing outside the traditional academic workshop setting. so please, feel free to critique, comment, suggest, attack, admire, or anything else which i should consider for future works.

also in 2013:
january, 2013 february, 2013 march, 2013

also by jakob maier:


beautiful mean things may

contact me:
facebook.com/iammaier iammaier.tumblr.com iamjakobmaier@gmail.com @iammaier

You might also like