SPOTLIGHT: ‘Jovian Days’ by Francis Rozon

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a birthday

birthday boy’s blood pressure dropped before
he killed his car

the first time he said he was 26 out loud was
in an ambulance ivy-like readers on his chest

the crisp oxygen from the venturi mask interfering
with the vision of jagged plastic growing enveloping

as the smoke flowers nonchalantly as a charcoal chrysanthemum
in the hypoestes light of the road flares on setting horizon

he considers the liquid poppies imbibing the cream
fabric on his fingertip

he feels like a hypocrite for his exuberant
portrayal of genuine traumatic stupor

…

he is out of his wit at the ophthalmologist’s
when the assistant sends a blazing flash splashing
on his retina imprinting a vision tangerine and
dendritic chartreuse green in the occipital

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pity party

a pity
party
for me

slow like
honey
melancholy

you running
like water
firestarter

i love you
lots like
apricots

ingenuous
flesh altars
compounding

peripheral
entropic
epiphanies

fragrantly
vinegary
yayo also

slice of
life i share
to care

but i didn’t’
see any
body

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a dandelion pushing through concrete

i’m pretty good at crochet
but not like my maternal grandmother,
who is a virtuoso

doilies are my favourite to weave
she does a bit of everything, in fact it’s
pretty much the only area of her life
where she does everything

she still lives in her native 40’s
where everything was always black and white,
she has no space for my gray areas in her life

often i have wished for crocheting to be
a generational act of transmission which
would stitch together ice and fire,
could mend some of the gap between our philosophies

but stitches are for bitches
and i am one just not in a way she’d understand

i paint entropic dreamscapes with words
all her paintings are realist pieces

i learn the zeitgeist of an era i never saw
while all she reads is hermetic nostalgia
of a time personally traversed

i’m pretty good at crochet
not like my maternal grandmother but
it’s okay because

she’s like an orchid in that she
only thrives in a very specific setting

i’m a dandelion pushing through concrete

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pushing up daisies

i still live in the house where i learned to brush my teeth and
sometimes it feels like one day i’ll be pushing up daisies
next to my childhood pets in the backyard

when you pass the quarter of a century mark you’re
scientifically past your prime
i’m at that age where so many stars have died,
there’s been deterioration in my organism already

the show that was to be never begun, i just kept dragging
around the solar orb in my rehearsal clothes, for my quotidian
forms the pedigree of languishment

I wonder if the possibility for a first love at 27 might
feel like the great coming of age story i never had, or
may have come and gone without notice for my back
was turned all along

i still miss the car i destroyed in the course of a short but
unforgiving dissociative fugue on a rushed overpass a year ago
it was my birthday, my parents had gotten me a white cake
which was advertised as chocolate with blue frosting roses

but there are no blue rose gardens, and
now my oranges are sunburned

there is only present but the years must be raining down, for
the last time i checked on the green of my salad days it had
turned to mildew

of course i remember my teenage dreams of dusting diamonds
but i don’t think i’ll ever be 98 pounds inhabiting a victorian
house i sometimes wished a tudor even though i hate cutting grass

so can someone take my soul out of the ice-box before it freezes

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