Senior Class Poet Contestant, Wesley Brown: Nerve Damage
To honor the University’s Senior-Class-Poet contestants and to commemorate National Poetry Month, the Library is publishing contestants’ poems on Falvey’s blog. The Library also has created posters for the contestants’ poems, which are displayed throughout the first floor.
Each spring semester, all seniors are encouraged to enter the Senior-Class-Poet Contest. The Department of English will announce the 2013 Senior-Class Poet later this month.
……….Nerve Damage
… ……by Wesley Brown
Ever since I cried into this world and smashed
last week
my hand between those doors
Electricity has lied to me
Twinges in your neck call for massages
cold compress
hot bath
I’ve always wanted an electrician
to spread out my miles of nerves like Christmas lights
test each bulb and find
my broken parts
HOW DOES THIS FEEL
Wasted and it’s late
HOW DOES THIS FEEL
First-dance-bashful
HOW DOES THIS FEEL
A cheerful kind of dying
HOW DOES THIS FEEL
Every worst thing I’ve ever said
A tangle of nerves and heartbreak
He carefully unknots the slender tendrils
Each bio-electrical brush of his dusted hands bringing me
jolts
of Christmas and kitten fur
The thorniest part of the thicket
chokes around
barbed wire hydras hissing
like a throat trying to swallow against static weight
Here’s the part
Here’s the part that’s been cramping my
yellowed heart
He unwraps my uselessness
my sense of something more
my experience of God
and the taste of half-rotted apples
His electricity mixes with my own as he picks up
the grain of sand that’s been causing all my problems
all this time
It’s gone
My neck untwinges
I lie still
For a long time
My electricity flowing smooth
in a useless, perfect circle
It hums
And these days
I fall asleep hard
And dream of days when heartbreak mattered more
A Senior-Class-Poet Contestant, Wesley says “I write my poems with a certain vision in mind, but in important ways that vision doesn’t matter at all. My interpretation of my work is just that, an interpretation. I have often had friends of mine convince me that my poems aren’t about what I thought they were at all.”
Wesley Brown is an English and History major from San Mateo, Calif.
More of Wesley’s poems appear on his poetry blog: beautifularithmetic.wordpress.com.
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