Not that it was as it was said to bebut rather as it would have been:the notion of our otherwise, like a nationunfit for economics, persistingin the brainwaves of its ambassador,or by way of an accumulative logic,train cars amassing in the fieldbeneath the rail bridge, a few shouts,light snow or panic, the marchingof the too-loud sun. Not so.A quotient of abstraction travels upyour spinal column, births an impulsetowards texting. Small rivulets of MDMAin the heartland. Beaked men beneathyour window, the lunacy of stars.I gather it all in my cloak and set offtowards a future we would have wantedhad we known it could be known to us.Pilgrims strung from the jiggly boughsof maples, the hounds’ corrupting song.
[Not that it was as it was said to be]
Michael Martin Shea
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From To Hell With Good Intentions: by Michael Martin Shea.
Published by Beautiful Days Press in 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Michael Martin Shea.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Michael Martin Shea is the author of The Immanent Fields, forthcoming from New Mundo Press in 2026, as well as numerous chapbooks of poetry, including most recently I’m Sorry But None of This Is My Fault (Essay Press, 2025). He is also the translator of the Argentine poet Liliana Ponce’s Theory of the Voice and Dream (World Poetry Books, 2025). His poems and translations have appeared in Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Fence, jubilat, New England Review, POETRY, and elsewhere. In addition to his creative work, he is a scholar of hemispheric American poetry and poetics; his scholarship has appeared in Cultural Dynamics and is forthcoming in English Literary History. He earned his doctorate in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
"If William Carlos Williams swallowed a Xanax and three tabs of acid, if he attempted to take a long nap, and if his brain was wired to a contraption that transcribed his bad dreams into poems, they might look a bit like Michael Martin Shea’s placid, euphoric, and horrifying vision of the lyric. In To Hell With Good Intentions, things don’t merely contain ideas; rather, they vibrate like prophetic objects in a televised crime scene, overflowing with the alternate grief and joy of our excessive present—a world filled with burning Amazon vans, airborne Doritos bags, and a humanity that is both knowable and not: “new toes which grew inside you / teeth new mouth new endless revision.” I am in love with Michael Martin Shea’s “beautiful brain” and these violent, gorgeous little poems that crawled like neon worms from its folds."
—Marty Cain
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