A Love Poem As Directed By Michael Bay
by J. Bradley
The heart is a gas tanker truck
awaiting rupture.
Woo it with a glinting gunmetal smile.
Woo it with a staccato of AR-15s.
Say “My world ends without you”,
bending your mouth like girder.
J. Bradley is the author of the graphic poetry collection The Bones of Us (YesYes Books, 2014) with art by Adam Scott Mazer. He runs the Central Florida based reading series There Will Be Words and lives at iheartfailure.net.
What can you tell us about this poem, from idea to final form? The idea of the poem comes from a series I write once in awhile called “A Love Poem…” either as directed by a movie director or written within a specific universe. Michael Bay films tend to be too long and loud (and I love them for those reasons—they are mostly fun to watch, despite how they ruin a childhood or two). Each director or universe has patterns within their work that I work from in creating these poem. While Bay isn’t known for his brevity, the poem needed to be for it to be effective; love isn’t always a power ballad.
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