POETRY: The Best Lover That Ever Leaves You / PAUL CORMAN-ROBERTS
Paul Corman-Roberts just recently released his newest collection of poetry–Bone Moon Palace (Nomadic Press)–and we are very excited. Like, jittery in our boots excited, palms sweaty enough to leave handprints on your shirt excited, teeth grindingly, eye-popping excited.
And to celebrate, Corman-Roberts was kind enough to do a reading of one of the pieces from the collection, “The Best Lover That Ever Leaves You”, for the website. And this is a wild poem. A poem that jumps the varied continents of a big imagination from lost loves to pixel pools to desert skinwalkers and so much more. Get ready.
Give it a listen. Buy the book here.
“The Best Lover That Ever Leaves You”
by Paul Corman-Roberts
A lie
told to you by a lover
you figure out years after
the fact of the lie
and you may not even
be the victim of the lie
just the first person
other than the architect
to discover its architecture.
So often, I hear/feel
the call of the dust
wanting to cake
my body.
Not even the wildfires
come here anymore.
Even they fear this
Adderall curtain
With its unique palace
of broke down crying
over every lover
reminds us how
we always wonder if the taste of stolen kisses
changes over time
leaving you wishing
for the rain because the rain
is the best lover that ever
leaves you and then comes
back only to leave you again
but you always take the rain
back even though its comes
around less and less these days
you always take that water back.
There are whole towns
whole cities in the west
that don’t realize they have already
become ghost towns and ghost cities.
The drought makes me feel like
I am destined to die
in one of these places
an annual tractor demolition festival
fueled by polymeth dreams
posted on the internet every year
does not a community make
or does it?
Maybe someday you will say
“no” to the rain and take that
longest ride into the wilderness
into the lover we all eventually take
to the desert so long you forget
you ever knew the rain.
Skinwalkers become your friends.
You hang out in skinwalker mining claims
hang out in skinwalker bars
only watching skinwalker TV shows.
Shape-shifters are their own mafia
they will never let you go if you decide
you want to leave you will need to do so
when they sleep.
They taught you how to extract the green juice
from any mammal lost in the valley how to
shoot bone into the chakras of the people you
love to cast your spell upon them to
somehow become them.
But this ain’t the life for you.
It’s time to not be there
when they turn to your corner
for their bidding and all
without leaving the warm
glow of your hovel where you have
jacked your tether deep into the pixel pool;
No, you keep on keepin’
under the wide-open desert sky
because denial might be
the only river out here,
because denial might be the only thing
you’ve ever denied yourself.
Paul Corman-Roberts is a poet living in the Bay Area.
