Cento
at the very outset I will tell you that if you think I know something or anything I am just pretending to know as a way to pass the time
personally I think we should all be in our rooms writing
critical components of creative writing are a necessary gesture to validate the endeavor in the eyes of the academy which would like our brains to expand
but I like things the size of a pea
in winter, I collapse
my thoughts become wind on a puddle of coffee
I go into the cracked gray street
I ride the train for the thousandth time
I enter the murderous innocence of the sea
the soft tumult of thy hair
I’d eat a bag of your hair
sometimes I get carried away
one day the role of me will be played by no one
and when the laugh and song go lightly by
I will sit down in the wild bushes and weep
I wanna leap from the bridge I’ve made of my wrongs
I’m not sad
I’m just always here
while you are not
I am serious
even if it isn’t me
what am I going to do
now that it hurts to think
to look at those I love
Sara I messed up
nights I try to write the letter Dear Sara I say but it doesn’t work
no, I don’t care what they say
what they do to me now
I used to
terribly
and then you didn’t
and then I didn’t
an image is not a portal
an image is distraction
I faced the doors of a church
and thought: how to live
if this is who I am
if this is who you are
I have a costume
and no meaning
I know you will disappear completely from my life
your hair a shower
organized by a god
I don’t believe in
in a way that leaves a scar, I no longer wish to love
if rain is never out of tune
it’s never in it either
and then I tried to put myself at a distance from the subject, but the distance was just another angle on the same subject
and it was always the same subject, you.
the world is full of paper
write to me
daddy’s little accident
i say wanna slide down the rainbow with me & a crow peeks its head from the belly of a doe. it’s as tho everything were beautiful, as if seen from an uber. i eat starbursts & stalk you. i’m 4. i don’t know anything yet. and i’m 0 for 2 when it comes to love. my body is orange. i couldn’t buy you flowers even if i wanted to.
the big shave
down bad for some busywork, i shaved my neck & now i wanna pull
a cop over & say, do you know how fast i was going? i feel bad
for not keeping track of where i get my words but
better writers have ignored more than me, and they don’t give out
awards for most organized notes on a poem. how american of me
to think of the phrase flyover. this is when i get in lust
with the idea that i loved the other more than me
then divorce the concept when i see it sleeping
in another man’s book. this poem’s fantasy’s
an academic saying maman. feeling approximately pretty,
you tied my heart & pulled. where will all the nudes go?
i no longer care what is taking you so long
to respond. i put all my eggs in your basket
and then you went to town.
Ulyses Razo is the author of Murders & Other Poems (Ghost City Press, 2024), a fellowship recipient from Paul Smith’s College, and a previous poet-in-residence at Bethany Arts. Razo’s poems have been featured by Hobart, ShitWonder, SARKA, Car Crash Collective, Amygdala Journal, Dream Boy Book Club, Discount Guillotine, dadakuku, SWAMP, and others. New work is forthcoming from Jon Leon’s Annual Report, Die Quieter Please vol. 2, and Defunkt Press’ Surreal Confessional Anthology. He lives and writes in London.
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