“Horrorfield” by T. Young

Thom Young is an artist and caregiver living in Kansas City, Missouri. BESPOKE, a long poem, was published by Saint Andrews University Press in 2019. Other work has appeared internationally.

Horrorfield

Leave me on unending light

In the shower I remember deleterious

How would it feel

Relish in an image of pain

Cabbage become relish

Remember your vision?

273 131 1.5

Followed a cop for thirty miles

Everything comes out in the revision

Scored the core of the fennel bulb

Cleared the path clean

Probation officer knocks on my door by accident

He tells me it is locusts I hear sawing through the night

The winter remains cold, almost colder

Lynn always worried about the unevenness,

But now it’s been made new

Rise in anticipation

What can I recycle from the other

Scrap or salvage? Choice in choice—

It interlocks amidst desires

Left the church over a paleontological disagreement

Listen to the sermon on your back porch, drive-thru prayer

Let cute be the medium of all future communications

Thirty pages of nothing

Rock floating in stream of change

—by a shark, at the beach (inevitably)

Hit by a car hit by a car hit by a car

Watched her die in my hands, at the end her eyes were white and

‘What loss the world to never see

We let the mirror sit outside

Ran over the crop with blades

Psychomanteum: place of divination, of summoning the dead

Candles lit outside at night provide inadequate light

Death poem sprawls over pages in an evaporation become reflection

Words we cannot use

Chant from your grave how you have it better off

Long beans searing thirty minutes

I summoned your soul in my spare room

Flat tire along the highway, nowhere, nighttime

Failed corn experiment, stalk paralyzed

Fire in the spot left the whole thing rotten

Gone, gone so the yard is covered in kudzu, house taken—

Something ate the sage

Ontology of underwear

His next project is a bust of God

The scratches continue under the floor

An aneurysm, they moved in while she was in hospital

I only waited three days, but I hesitate to call it waiting

He is a failed carpenter, she is a nurse

City fines keep going up

Place of death

Emotional affair, can it be called a friendship

A preference towards single men

Can’t go in the temple

Morning looks like aim

Abby asks about beneficial friends

Mobility around tragedy, response time, management of societal pain

Leaves the scene of their own crime

Our appearance here prevents them thinking we do nothing

Accident turned us around and that’s when it happened

I imagine it could have been a fugue, but they lacked transposition

What gift will you leave the king

At work, I wear two masks

Tell them you are one with the Christ

Only thing I wanted from Florida was to see a manatee

Begin with the end in mind

Road washed out by Smoot Park

Old smoke stack towers over town to remind of lost industry

Every corner crested by a shadow figured from my mind

Alternate route through wealth

Escape logic, arrives upon the scene

Savor this moment when we are heroes

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