28 Feb Matt Cook – Five Poems

Matt Cook is the author of four books of poetry: In the Small of My Backyard (Manic D Press, 2002), Eavesdrop Soup (Manic D Press, 2005), The Unreasonable Slug (Manic D Press, 2007), and PROVING NOTHING TO ANYONE (Publishing Genius Press, 2013). His work has been anthologized in Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poet’s Café, The United States of Poetry, and in Good Poems, American Places. Matt is the former Poet Laureate of Milwaukee, where he currently resides.

The following poems are from his collection Irksome Particulars available for purchase here.

1
You feel a lovely cool breeze coming in through the kitchen window which makes you feel that things are right in the world, but you’re intelligent enough to know that things are not right in the world, so you understand the lovely cool breeze to be just another dirty lie.

2
You question your decision to go for a walk today. Why not instead simply remember an old walk you took once before? Or, better, misremember an old walk you took once before.

3
You’re enjoying the contemplation of a fellow man’s shortcomings when the power goes out and you light a candle on the stove and you forget where you left off in your thinking, and then you think, oh, yes, of course, a fellow man’s shortcomings.

4
You can’t tell whether the upstairs neighbors are having sex or listening to talk radio that sounds like sex or whether they are having sex that sounds like talk radio.

5
You question how it is profitable to grow a banana in Costa Rica and ship the banana to Milwaukee and then sell the banana for nineteen cents. You reason that they probably ship more than one banana at a time.