Zombie film sonnet
 

We need more cinema about killing. 

I mean movies about killing zombies. 

Cinema seems the wrong word for zombie 

films, or movies about killing zombies, 

although cinema could work for killing 

as a theme or action.  I mean movies 

can be arty, even about killing, 

but probably not films about zombies, 

or films about killing zombies.  Zombie 

movies then are not cinema. Zombie 

movies are films.  We could use serial 

films.   On television.  A serial 

series about a serial killer 

of zombies.  Man that would be a killer. 

 

*

 

Indulgences

 
My therapist told me the book that I needed

 

was Out of the Shadows, by Carnes.

 

Healing the Sexual Addict, it warns.

 

I’ll buy a copy tomorrow, I lied.

 

I hated that therapist, anyway,

 

his post-modern priesthood,

 

hated his fees, hated to pay

 

for what ought to come free.

 

Instead, I read The Story of an Eye,

 

then Miller, then Nin, then Lawrence,

 

then Wilde . . .

 

 

To drift with every passion ‘til my soul 

 

was a stringed lute on which all winds could play

 

2 weeks later I was lost, in the pull

 

of a blonde & feminine gravity,

 

no less than I was when in therapy.

 

 *

 

Talk

 

All this “God Talk” in all this poetry,

 

it’s weird.  I do it myself.  I’m guilty.

 

There’s Eliot, of course.  

 

Is he Christian?

 

One can’t know.   

 

One can know Christ was Jewish.

 

I guess that makes Eliot Christianish . . .

 

given his disdain for the Jewish man.

 

There’s Hopkins & his symphony of sound,

 

his sound of God, 

 

his sound of consonants,

 

his sound of vowels 



& his search for constants.

 

But he knew God as well as he knew sound.

 

& there’s the masses –  

 

asking God for shit,

 

a new house, 

 

a new lover, a new me,

 

& victory over their enemy.

 

Now. . . if only I can just ignore it.

 

*



Sick 

             – after reading Aime Cesaire


Decadence like war now has veterans, 

 

to die of an age, era, or epoch, hung over,

 

the “watery suns of rums” gone down,

 

to the other side of the World,

 

not forgotten, in their place,

 

the herald of morning signaled,

 

by horns blown with curled toes,

 

a rousing cock’s crows,

 

& the unfurled sheets of a nameless whore,

 

me, 

 

the sun, 

 

in place of the watery suns of rums, 

 

coming up,

 

& on the other side of the World,

 

dreams aborted by a mere alarm clock.

 

To die from an age, era, or epoch

 

            is not the desired aim.

 

She shows gums, yellow teeth, smiles.

 

Speaks tenderly . . . please. . . come. . .

 

*



Topiary

 

 

It is a strange art.  

 

And a strange reminder.

 

People cannot just leave plant life alone 

 

            anymore than 

 

leaving people alone.

 

Whoever did this is no gardener.

 

He shaped you, 

 

                                    (and editors cut my work),

 

shaped you into some cartoon character

 

for tourists to this amusement park.

 

 

Some donor has taken over nature by proxy.  

 

You can’t follow the money when it comes 

 

            to a mutilated plant.

 

Gardeners grow.  

 

This hack job is different.

 

But I can follow your roots. 

 

I can see your patience hidden in you.  

 

You will still return to Earth despite this.  

 

We both will.

 

 * 

 

Giving it up

 

                        – After John Berryman

 

When my un-warranted wants get planted

 

deep into the plots of my seedy head

 

I think thoughts of deflowering, of bed.

 

 

It’s not just hell that leaves me imprisoned.

 

For all the tricks of its light, I see red.

 

Red is fire, stop, passion, blood, her hair.

 

“I couldn’t rest from hell just anywhere.”

 

(I should be resting from heaven instead.

 

Whenever I think of her, I’m not there,

 

but she is . . . she is an aporia).

 

 

Images of her dance about like smoke

 

about my face while I think, pace, drink, choke.

 

 

My lungs turn black, my cigarettes burn red.

 

Alack, alas, a lack, et cetera.

 

* 

 

(may be cut as needed)

 

 

About the Poet 

 

 J.T. Whitehead has Bachelors’ degrees from Wabash College in English & Philosophy. He received a Master’s degree in Philosophy from Purdue, where he studied Existentialism, social and political philosophy, and Eastern Philosophy. He earned a law degree from Indiana University, Bloomington.  He spent time between, during, and after schools on a grounds crew, as a pub cook, a delivery man, a book shop clerk, and a liquor store clerk, inspiring four years as a labor lawyer on the workers’ side. Whitehead now practices law by day and poetry by night and lives in Indianapolis with his two sons, Daniel and Joseph.  

 Whitehead was Editor in Chief of So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, briefly, for just five issues: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6.  He is a one-time Pushcart Prize-nominated short story author (2011), a seven-time Pushcart Prize-nominated poet (2015, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020), and was the winner of the Margaret Randall Poetry Prize (2015).  Whitehead has published over 300 poems and prose works in over 110 literary journals and small press publications, including The Lilliput Review, Outsider, Slipstream, Left Curve, The Broadkill Review, The Iconoclast, and Gargoyle.  His first full-length collection of poetry, The Table of the Elements, was nominated for the National Book Award in 2015.