Tuesday poem #245 : Shane Book : Vaporwave

Started from the bottom.

Well guess what?

When it coats your face
everyone flees.

A mango ice cream mask for my skin,
that ass getting fatter
and I know it’s because of me.

Tell a story about how you’re old
and afraid to die boring, Conquistador.
Pour that bubbly.

My style’s the highest.
I tried to hire a stylist.
Spanish swords and European diseases
couldn't style me.

I’m so groovy. I got power.
You don’t want no war, oh no.
Blind your eye with my ring.

Come-on estate come down.
In Nairobi, I order a filet
of just-passed-its-prime rhino.
If it ain’t like gwop I’m gone.

Shane Book’s [photo credit: Grace Image/Jeni Fong] first collection, Ceiling of Sticks, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award and was a Poetry Society of America “New Poet” Selection. His second, Congotronic, was a University of Iowa Press Kuhl House Poets Selection, won the Archibald Lampman Award and was shortlisted for the Canadian Authors Association Award, Ottawa Book Award, and 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is also a filmmaker whose award-winning work has screened in festivals and on television around the world. He was educated at New York University, where he was a New York Times Fellow; the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Teaching-Writing Fellow; and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He was the 2016-2017 Writer in Residence at the University of Calgary and is now an associate professor in the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria. 

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan