JOHN PAUL DAVIS
Two poems
Impossibly
There is no realer version of Chicago
somewhere out there among the rivers
& lakes & what once was prairie
just as there is no definitive New York
crowding the Hudson, perching
on its islands. It’s the same with Yellow Springs
or North Carolina or Oakland.
Nothing has a truest form.
Instead everything is always
what we carry inside us. Xenia Avenue
was a locus of beauty
until it was the swollen ache of a bruise
but only for me, at least in that order,
in that particular way. The old speakeasy
at the glowing corner of Lawrence & Clark
was a home, and then a foreign
country all in the same year
& I walk around with both of them still
like someone toting an overfull grocery bag,
shifting it from arm to arm. Greenpoint
was a place I slept & healed
& that bar on the second floor on 13th Street
is now nothing more than a bar
but I will never not be under the burden
of all those whiskey Mondays of poetry
& brushings-past that were almost
but never truly friendship. The house
on 44th Street is still there in a city
anyone could visit but the one
where I smelled the jasmine
curtaining the bedroom window
every morning & believed
simply, like a puppy, in the future
of my first marriage
exists only in what I hold
along with every other place
that once held me. They all tangle
together in the plot
of me, and the territory
of it is real or realer than any geography,
this improbable city of mine,
this knot of every place I’ve known, looms
in me, makes a world
of me, makes me as much as I made it
which I did only by being, by standing dizzily
at certain moments under certain moons,
being myself but also simultaneously
being replaced, protein by protein,
until I was something altogether new
yet still impossibly exactly only me.
Luck
Things have been getting smaller
this city for instance & phones
with touchscreens & the steps
I take & I love my small small
world, even with sorrow
weaved into it even with frustration
I love blurring my eyes open
every morning with my beloved wrapped
around me, breathing onto my heart
the moon is also shrinking
& everyone’s vocabulary
is doing… something
that makes it smaller
I forget the exact term
anyway I slip on my smaller shoes
but they don’t pinch
my feet are tinier too
& I don’t need the littler bicycle
that’s reducing in the shrinking corner
of the diminishing spare room
because of the contracting streets.
Let a represent any dwindling
origin in this town & let b equal
any possible destination
the math reveals a minus b
is now much smaller
than it was yesterday or five
minutes ago though
my ability to perform such calculations
is not as great
as it once was I don’t need
math to see the space
between us is virtually nonexistent
what luck I have you to complete
my sentences & is that your tongue
in my mouth now we have the same blood
& cells now the same atoms
now now there there
I can’t tell who’s writing
this poem me or you or you you you
John Paul Davis is a poet, musician and programmer. His first book, Crown Prince Of Rabbits, was published in 2017 by Great Weather For Media. HIs poems have been published in numerous magazines and journals. He is one-half of the indie pop duo Love In The Ruins. He has programmed websites for U.N. Women, The Obamas, Elizabeth Warren, Sierra Club, Habitat For Humanity and many others. He lives with his wife, actress Mahira Kakkar, in New York City. You can find our more about him at John Paul Davis