Tyler Wettig Is Soldering Misfit Ends, Eschewing Beethoven's Eschewing, Listening To An Angel's Death-Rattle, And Watching The Ceiling Of The Sistine Drip

Drone

Your goal is to suffer a little less
than you did yesterday, or so to do
for a different reason. You solder
the misfit ends, adlib from a sexless
lacuna, ponder/muse/regret seeds of
absurdity the maker (and maker’s
maker) planted, try to get it more
right every time. But sweet mortality’s
got its talon-grip on you, regardless:
grey, molting, and matted like the first sweet
cat you lost. You promise the first marriage
will be the last. Good. You anticipate
tragedy like it’s all you know: for those
seeds you saw planted, tilled?
They’ll grow and grow.


Pondering Romanticism

Foolhardy you plumb the standards, the hard
stuff: give thanks to Beethoven's eschewing.
Somewhere a conductor has lost his grip,
but you know hands that have seen weirder nights.

You’re lonely, in love, and engaged. Sharing
a bed has come easy . . . your thoughts: not so
much. The mind stays abuzz with repetition,
so the poems write themselves. You’re orbiting,

lucid and alive, at the crack of dark,
animus in tooth and claw to spear your
side. No, you’re not in love with your mother;
but lust, infernal muse, is burning in
her myth.



Inferno

I’m interred in autumn’s naked dusk,
the earth-chapel’s blessed breath complicit
in my better angels’ death-rattle. The
Zoloft has faded, and my little black dog,
wriggling out of his fur to chase shadows,
could sniff out my cancer just as well: soul
effaced by fatherhood’s fugue—creation
condemned to being—is an etude piano-
hands, mine, can’t resolve. I’m about-face
enough to split out of my own skin, and
and in every white-noise baptismal,
I give this to all my unborn children:
“Go take care of your mother. And what’s
at either end of that leash.”



Reckoning

In a bed big enough for only one,
I’m thinking Michelangelo’s
David: the perfect man with the perfect
body. The ceiling drips Sistine, but maybe
that’s just you. Cold pizza’s in the
fridge; an unfinished fugue in my head;
and you, well, giving head. But we have a
city to explore (for a price). So, for
now, let’s explore us: this pantheon of
the absurd. With our idols adorned so
contrapposto, let’s think Bernini:
play the heretics and pray about
it tomorrow; our knees won’t make it
that far to the ground in church.




Tyler Wettig resides in Ypsilanti, Michigan. His latest chapbook is The Adult Table (Zetataurus, 2018). Tyler's website: https://www.tylerwettig.wordpress.com.