You weren’t the one I loved. I must confess:
I didn’t have the depth yet. It was Paul, of course
his droopy eyes and putty lips,
babylike, unthreatening, despite the then-
brutal sexiness of the songs.
Can we imagine such emptiness? Such quiet.
Every bit of us, gone: the jackal-mouthed
and gospel-wild, razor wire
keeping out the needful
of our kind, even the ruins of holy cities
“…the pure pleasure of the numinous poem, which, in the final analysis, might contain our personal myths, successful in the way myths are successful, in their transmission of complexity, magic, and the paradoxes of this painfully-beautiful world.”
Luke Johnson’s debut poetry collection portrays a dream world linked to a stark reality, where generational trauma is recognized as an artifact of mind, a collection of leaping memories that haunt and possess.