reading: Insomnia Diary by Bob Hicok

If you haven't heard of the poet Bob Hicok you are lucky because now you get to discover him. I've recently read his collection Insomnia Diary, which I highly recommend to anyone who likes, well, I really just recommend it to anyone. His poems are refreshingly honest, grounded in the everyday of the working life, yet they're also explosive, bursting with love and longing, full of images that are sometimes electric and sometimes so quiet that it hurts. As found on The Poetry Foundation's website, here is the beautiful and haunting poem, "The semantics of flowers on Memorial Day:"

Historians will tell you my uncle

wouldn't have called it World War II

or the Great War plus One or Tombstone

over My Head. All of this language

came later. He and his buddies

knew it as get my ass outta here

or fucking trench foot and of course

sex please now. Petunias are an apology

for ignorance, my confidence

that saying high-density bombing

or chunks of brain in cold coffee

even suggests the athleticism

of his flinch or how casually

he picked the pieces out.

Geraniums symbolize the secrets

life kept from him, the wonder

of variable-speed drill and how

the sky would have changed had he lived

to shout it’s a girl. My hands

enter dirt easily, a premonition.

I sit back on my uncle’s stomach

exactly like I never did, he was

a picture to me, was my father

looking across a field at wheat

laying down to wind. For a while,

Tyrants’ War and War of World Freedom

and Anti-Nazi War skirmished

for linguistic domination. If

my uncle called it anything

but too many holes in too many bodies

no flower can say. I plant marigolds

because they came cheap and who knows

what the earth’s in the mood to eat.