Bryan D. Price ~ Crania Americana

pray to noth­ing or maybe to the
video where the prime min­is­ter tells the
world that Franco’s final­ly dead where do
we go after fas­cism an amer­i­can Golgotha
awaits I wish I had hung art on these
walls framed mag­a­zine clippings
self-drawn por­traits tesser­ae made from
cut up money—anything to absorb
the light and espe­cial­ly my atten­tion I have
begun wear­ing only thread­bare clothing
unbe­com­ing as it is I can’t bring myself
to buy to shed to pro­cure only to fabricate
but I can’t fab­ri­cate so I’ll wrap myself
in a sheet dump myself down the
drain or onto a pyre enflamed by the idea
that we’re still alive after what we’ve done
I could have invent­ed a new lan­guage or
at least engaged in some kind of
cryp­tog­ra­phy but I’m no col­lag­ist or
puz­zle-mak­er the whole world is
laugh­ing at us in oth­er words we have
the world’s most slap­pable faces and I
think they could have laughed at us sooner—
for Andy Warhol maybe or for drinking
whisky with break­fast into the 1830s but
I wish you could have been there with
me when I paint­ed the Pietà when I painted
the ham­mer that smashed the Pietà when I
paint­ed Thomas Stearns Eliot (sup­pos­ed­ly)
falling on his knees before the Pietà when
I paint­ed the decline and fall of the
American empire as seen from a rest stop
on the 10 some­where between Indio and
the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station
ca. 2020 or 2021 AD

~

Bryan D. Price’s poet­ry has appeared or is forth­com­ing in the Broadkill Review, Posit, the UCity Review, Diagram, and oth­ers. He lives in San Diego with his wife, a dog, and a cat named after Pina Bausch.