Praise for Can You Sign My Tentacle?
“All the poems in O’Brien’s collection, like tracks in a poetic album: entertains, amuses, enlightens and inspires. More than anything else, his Author’s Note is the perfect ending for this Album of the Year for me, sharing the poet’s journey in the realm of science fiction, the impact of Cthulhu mythos and the relationship to Blackness & racism. I will sign any tentacles he waves in my direction.”
* * *
—Linda D. Addison, award-winning author, HWA Lifetime Achievement Award recipient and SFPA Grand Master.
* * *
Dreamlike, visceral, and emotionally moving. An intoxicating poetic journey and a heartbreaking ode casting your fave hip-hop artists juxtaposed with chilling and beautiful imagery through the haunting lens of tangible pain, loss, grief and love.
—Tlotlo Tsamaase, author of The Silence of the Wilting Skin
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
CAN YOU SIGN MY TENTACLE?
Text Copyright © 2021 by Brandon O’Brien
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author and publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Edited by Holly Lyn Walrath.
Cover design by Trevor Fraley.
Published by Interstellar Flight Press.
Houston, Texas.
www.interstellarflightpress.com
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-953736-05-5
ISBN (Paperback): 978-1-953736-04-8
Can You Sign My Tentacle?
Poems
Brandon O’Brien
Interstellar Flight Press
Contents
Hastur Asks for Donald Glover’s Autograph
because who she is matters more than her words
Cthylla Asks for Drake’s Autograph
the repossession of skin
The Sailor-Boys
Lovecraft Thesis #1
postcard 20xx, where there are no dirges
hunting dog
Hastur Asks for Lord Kitchener’s Autograph
the lagahoo speaks for itself
Lovecraft Thesis #2
That Business They Call Utopia, Part Two
Birth, Place
Cthulhu Reminisces Upon The Mighty Sparrow and Lord Melody’s Autographs
postcard 20xx, of our garden and beach
Cthulhu Asks for Kendrick Lamar’s Autograph
Young Poet Just Misses Getting MF DOOM’s Autograph
Kanye West’s Internet Bodyguard Asks Hastur to Put Away the Phone
the one
Cthylla Asks for J. Cole’s Autograph
Lovecraft Thesis #3
The Metaphysics of a Wine, in Theory and Practice
time, and time again
tar baby
That Business They Call Utopia, Part Three
Lovecraft Thesis #4
Lovecraft Thesis #5
That Business They Call Utopia, Part One
drop some amens
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
About the Author
About the Cover Artist
Interstellar Flight Press
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Hastur Asks for Donald Glover’s Autograph
a‖
In his house at Stone Mountain, real hip-hop Gambino
stays woke.
In floaters, he can see spacetime on opposite
ends of a line of scrimmage, watch them collide into
nebulae
to the point where he can’t even find himself out of that mess.
He doesn’t really know sleep. There’s too much to know.
Before the entourage parks outside the 2013 version
of Sway In The Morning, he’s already seen how it all
middles.
His gaze collides with the higher homes so hard he sits
in the studio sleepy-eyed and static. He has no problem
telling
folks they will all die someday. He gives away
Nostradamus
in thirty-two bars. He donates his barstool philosophy in
place of a chorus.
b‖
The other realm is lit like neon purple-green on sparklers
while the eldritch Elders sup sauce and complain about
their complicated family lives when Donald Glover in
a maroon cape floats by on grace. The Peacock King
himself flags him down before he can disappear,
and goes, ‘aren’t you in the wrong place?’
‘Bino says, ‘Nah’. Hastur goes, ‘I don’t think you wear that.’
‘Bino says, ‘I wear whatever, man.’ When Hastur
asks for an autograph for his shapeless niece, the pen
bursts vertices of truth all over the girl’s wings,
but she plays it off like it was nothing. They gawk at
the dude like he’s so huge, his own orbit’s unbeatable
even by apathy. He’ll forget their faces shortly. The idea
of it will probably vex them all so much. He’ll take
the nihilism with him, though.
c‖
If ‘America’ is in the title, it’s documentary.
First off, the man in that footage has no name,
or is named ‘Hopelessness’, or is named ‘Legacy’,
or just answers to hawk-cry. That ain’t Troy.
No matter. Both of ‘em lucky to be alive,
but one got on a boat, allegedly transcended all of this.
The other dreamt tendrils of things it shares a name with
until anxiety turns solid inside. The other tried to film
what he saw, but the lens kept finding things to laugh at
no matter the angle, even the bodies. The camera turned
and opened its jaw on him, shattered onto him like a
lightbulb,
and the truth, frayed, started screaming curses. No, that
ain’t Troy. But he’s in the frame somewhere.
d‖
Twin Peaks: The Return, Part Eight, ‘Gotta Light?’—
something bursts in the desert and gives birth
to darkness that waits to be consumed fresh.
Crawls into ears like lullaby, crawls between lips
like offering. Takes advantage of those who sleep.
Goes looking for fragile light to try to eat.
Atlanta: Robbin’ Season, Episode Six, ‘Teddy Perkins’—
Darius just wanted to pick up a sweet piano.
Turns out that goodness is often light-sensitive.
Turns out that darkness leaves all of its windows open
and makes lullaby out of everything. Turns out there’s
a duality in everything, and there’s blood
everywhere. Light takes its own life before it can be food.
Both episodes kill fearsome dread with humility.
Both tell you to run from what lingers in
wooden rooms.
Both are bright and odd, end in flat light burst.
And plus, Rotten Tomatoes loves them both.
e‖
You ask him about chaos in front of the late-
night studio audience. His autograph changes
shape before your eyes. You ask him why he’s so
nonchalant about death. He reminds you
nothing is more freein
g than knowing the cosmos
isn’t attached to you. “It feels like floating,”
he says. “I wish I could still have that,”
he says. Uneasy, the late-night host tries not
to look one tall audience member in the eye:
mustard coat, wriggling sinew, all grins and hollers.
The host asks, “Why can’t you have it?”
“The cosmos just won’t leave me alone.”
because who she is matters more than her words
there is a wolf prowling
in the stalks outside a black woman’s
Twitter profile, gnawing at
the bark of unsheathed pencils
and waiting to leap
* * *
at an unsuspecting neck. moonlight
strikes the head of a rocket statue to trigger
the pack, they howl and scrape
at the spines of scary galleys
with names they gutturally mispronounce for fun
* * *
takes her first draft and rolls it up,
throws the dusk-to-dawn lights on
outside the house that knows itself
and swats some of the tykes on their noses
* * *
till they scatter. her neighbor puts up
a warning: the residents here ain’t the ones.
the next HOA meeting makes a fence of bodies,
gathers its own nets, immunizes its own from fatal ideas,
puts buckshot in the barrels of their fountain pens.
* * *
we will hear about another pack before day even breaks,
best believe, but even our kids will know, will put
pebbles in their slingshots as warning. they will
tell stories in the cafeteria about how their mothers
were good with the blades of pens,
* * *
how they learned how to hold one early,
how nobody could ever tell them nothing ‘bout who they were.
and one night, when harvest night calls for starving wolves,
those children will reach for their mother’s weapons,
and cast light like there is no night.
Cthylla Asks for Drake’s Autograph
The gurgling girl runs into Drizzy as he shoots up
like a meteor through the universe. He’s in a hurry,
he ain’t got no time. He doesn’t hear her scream.
He barely hears her scream. When he hears her
scream, he puts on his light-skinned voice, says
he’s focused on this grind, on feeding his day-ones,
how an autograph isn’t the same as work.
She says she’s just asking for one minute,
she’s been listening since he turned stellar,
come on, man, just one autograph.
He scrapes through her left wing with a ballpoint pen.
She’s going on about how she loves that
he’s amorphous like she is, one moment he’s
down for the settle-down and the next he’s soft breath
tumbling out of the window and gone,
one moment he’s hard like bricks in flight and then
his voice is brown rum through a buzzing phone line.
Drizzy nods, says thank you, tries to head back up
up and away but the girl won’t stop talking about
a future the boy didn’t prophesy himself.
She blinks all eight orbs in a cascade
and watches him flutter into strobe-light burst
till the street turns quiet.
the repossession of skin
you’re glad to have a uniform, right?
cool.
find another. some of us live in this one.
you came to the wilds, you say—
‘your motherland’, you tell me,
* * *
hands clasped, grinning like the devil.
aren’t you so damn lucky?
* * *
it’s like your grandparents spat on the map
just in time for you to ‘teach me about my roots’.
* * *
the same ones I want to choke you out with?
take that costume off. please.
* * *
you have a ‘name’ now, something
‘important’—like ‘Phantom’ or ‘of the Jungle’;
* * *
you ever notice how it’s always in Imperial English?
but then again, I also hear
* * *
your cousins have gotten good at
literally stealing christenings from other mothers’ mouths.
* * *
take that off.
really.
* * *
someone has to sleep and wake in that skin.
you’re just sweating and masturbating in it.
* * *
maybe I go study under a white master
* * *
to perfect the art of colonialist capitalism;
maybe one of my buddies
* * *
falls off the side of a mountain in the Deep South
and stumbles into the way of the Colt Python
* * *
and we fight hordes of TV execs
who throw milquetoast casting calls with lethal force
* * *
and we win by stabbing each
of them in the eye with our fountain pens
* * *
and we peel their pale exteriors with our hands
and bite into whatever wicked pulp rests beneath
* * *
and we get whole seasons of ourselves
and neither of us gets written out
* * *
and our bodies still belong to us
and our bodies never forget the sound of our voice.
* * *
that show is much mightier
than you stripping us of our layers,
* * *
throwing the thinnest of them
over you like a nightgown
* * *
and dancing in the streets
insisting you’ve discovered something.
we won’t fucking ask
again.
The Sailor-Boys
We is some rebels, yes.
We does still sneak out the window
close to midnight with we sailboards
under we arms, scaling the outer
island walls to ride the winds.
* * *
Up here, we ibis-free, the bellies
of we boards scarlet, or yellow
like kingbirds, cutting the gale
like skipped stones could split water.
We is some aves, yes,
* * *
watching cormorants stain in the
blackwater beyond the beaches
where rigged exploitations did catch fire
but couldn’t have enough water to douse it.
We is some blessed ones, yes.
* * *
My mother did say we was once like
the black(-gold)-and-white(-collar) world of the developed,
all of their bigger pictures with no solutions,
but we let all our colours fly. Like
us boys doing now before sunrise,
* * *
we is some fresh starts, yes.
We does soar over sighing tragedy,
the heaving high tide of Mama Dlo short of breath,
and laugh, cheer the wind on as we float.
We is some rebels, yes.
Lovecraft Thesis #1
(Lupe Fiasco’s Food and Liquor, Track 2)
* * *
we have always concerned ourselves
at core with the same element:
the real. the act of documenting truths
some may never find the synapt
ic fortitude
to fathom:
the fathoms of the star path above
the fathoms of the middle passage beneath
that life is more than lilied assumptions
that a story can be stored in goatskin