#david rivard

kofi

I think the need gets stronger, he said, it just gets stronger.

David Rivard, “On Complexity,” as featured by the Poetry Society of America

David Rivard, "Iron Rising Out of Iron"

- By Then by David Rivard

Lucky day still spent wrestling the private problems and obsessions encountered first in your youth but played out now within the spectacle of public aging (tho, strangely, as you age you feel less & less seen by the young, a citizen active in frequencies of light waves increasingly invisible—not even boring to 15-year-olds). Of course, some problems you once had really have vanished—you can sense that as your daughter lays out the tactics crucial to "pre-gaming," her teen friends setting out to get toasted or stoned before house parties, parties at which they've been warned not to drug or drink— no longer a worry for you (except as relates, of course, to your daughter)—you can drink & drug somewhat "it would seem" to your heart's content. Not your style, you say? Not any longer? Still, the urge to lift or get lifted from self-conscious woes hasn't gone away totally, has it? Wanting to be free of your self has always been a mission big in your church—evangelically so! You got in a way (the wrong way) your wish— your skin certainly got looser on you—baggy, rounder, wrinkled—prescriptions for departure—the rigging's untuned, & no milk bath full of rose hips can compensate (so your friend likes to say), no fish oil omega-3 in gel capsules manufactured by entrepreneurial ex-hippies no wifely fruit smoothies or mod boots will cure jowls now or allow for glamour without the costume.

The American common is no collective or princedom but privacies of need & pleasure as they intersect in public spaces, tho the insufferable powers that be breed their plots behind our backs, thinking us witless, seemingly blind to their afflicted intentions, just a bunch of demographic motormouths & screw-ups to be targeted by commodities traders & search engines— a marketing niche for every need, stereotypes tagged by algorithms—here is a typical team of baton twirlers in an airport bar, each of them clad in foxy red track suits & tuned-in to the dollhouse stimulations of pigeon-talking sales reps; there is a previously undetected aggregation of retirees, evangelical camp kids, kickass bowlers, and mothy nuns in starched wimples, for whom the news of the day means the aging boy-man Hugh Grant's fear of double chins—neither of these or any other data dump entirely false, but so narrow-minded sometimes as to lose sight of us entirely: the midtown lady in Capris, a four-square surgeon off-duty & headed out to play poker, the plumber fly-fishing by the river— a sky of twilight slate now—not a word written on it.

The American common is no collective or princedom but privacies of need & pleasure as they intersect in public spaces, tho the insufferable powers that be breed their plots behind our backs, thinking us witless, seemingly blind to their afflicted intentions, just a bunch of demographic motormouths & screw-ups to be targeted by commodities traders & search engines— a marketing niche for every need, stereotypes tagged by algorithms—here is a typical team of baton twirlers in an airport bar, each of them clad in foxy red track suits & tuned-in to the dollhouse stimulations of pigeon-talking sales reps; there is a previously undetected aggregation of retirees, evangelical camp kids, kickass bowlers, and mothy nuns in starched wimples, for whom the news of the day means the aging boy-man Hugh Grant's fear of double chins—neither of these or any other data dump entirely false, but so narrow-minded sometimes as to lose sight of us entirely: the midtown lady in Capris, a four-square surgeon off-duty & headed out to play poker, the plumber fly-fishing by the river— a sky of twilight slate now—not a word written on it.