I write definitively
Because I’m always uncertain
And afraid
Yes
I’d like to try
On that $8,000 dress
I buy Nothing
This is a poem
I can do whatever
The fuck
I want
MEMOIR
I am 40
and blasted
on a rooftop
I am poor
so I put diamonds
💎💎
in my poems
CHARLIE ROSE WITHOUT MAKEUP
No need
For blush
Shame is my strongest emotion
The Humanities
Literally saved
No one
Noir sunset
The art
Of keeping
Is also easy
To master
Like a hoarder
Of pain
The nothing piles up
Around me
Giant lions
Of sand
An approaching storm
My eye
Darkness heaped
On Darkness
Is how I appear
On TV
A SHORT LIFE AND IT'S TROUBLE
reddit
them their disasters
I mutter
post-domestic bliss ambush
life is never
as real
as starting
a ‘92 Camry in February
the soul blown back
break me
make it
an inside job
Oppen never used similes
because things
only are
your wrist, this bed, the sky
coming down on us
light driven
through you
a nail
the burn of which
saves us
temporarily
I have $340 dollars in checking
nothing can stop me
coming up
out of water
feeling fairly
religious
I crawl
out of this crush
an animal
of now
waiting to download
or crash
honey in the tape deck
Sampson Starkweather is the author of PAIN: The Board Game (Third Man Books, 2015) and The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather (Birds, LLC, 2013). He is a founding editor of Birds, LLC, an independent poetry press. He is also the author of nine chapbooks, most recently Until the Joy of Death Hits, pop/love audio-visual GIF poems from Spork Press, and Flux Capacitor, a collaborative audio poetry album from Black Cake Records. He works for the Center for the Humanities at the City University of New York Graduate Center where he helps organize Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative and the NYC/CUNY Chapbook Festival. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.