MOSS IS
GOOD NEWS
FULL MOON OVER PAUL CREEK
Because There Is
Say Someone Steps
from The Zeros: Day Book
ANTHROPOCENTRIC POETICS 101
A FINE AND PUBLIC PLACE
ORDER OF DEAD.
SAUL IN THE DETAILS.
Time On My Hands (You... )
NAOMI: A MIDRASH
from LITERARY INDUSTRY
AN ORANGE SARDINE
LIKE (out of VFT's Marcelin Pleynet)
& OUT
MOSS IS
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m e . . . . . . . . . . .
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. . . a . . r . . . . . s
m e t a . . . p h . . . .
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. . . . m . . . . o s . s
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1971
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m e . . . . . . . . . . .
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. . . a . . r . . . s . .
. e t . . . . . h o s . .
. e . . . . r . . o . . s
. . . a m o r . . . . . .
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m e t a . . . p h . . . .
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1971
GOOD NEWS
In the burned-out bandstand
in the ash, a blackened baton;
behind the rhododendrons
bassoons lament a lost band.
A piccolo bleats in the shrubbery
-- semi-quavers of whimsy.
Past the balustrade, a brazen
couple lay
all over each other, their
transistor blazing
a trail across the grass.
It is bright yellow
& seems to be in control of the time:
its brass nerve is tuned in
to some promised land of capital.
What so loves itself surely
cannot fail
to rebuild paradise,
the state of the bandstand
notwithstanding
1972.
In the burned-out bandstand
in the ash, a blackened baton;
behind the rhododendrons
bassoons lament a lost band.
A piccolo bleats in the shrubbery
-- semi-quavers of whimsy.
Past the balustrade, a brazen
couple lay
all over each other, their
transistor blazing
a trail across the grass.
It is bright yellow
& seems to be in control of the time:
its brass nerve is tuned in
to some promised land of capital.
What so loves itself surely
cannot fail
to rebuild paradise,
the state of the bandstand
notwithstanding
1972.
FULL MOON OVER PAUL CREEK, MARCH/94.
i
The creek is a swift thief this time of year
when ice is breaking up on the lake.
It takes the image of the moon & kites
a thousand counterfeits downstream.
These moons pock the creek's dark surface
like tight-packed scales of trout.
i
The creek is a swift thief this time of year
when ice is breaking up on the lake.
It takes the image of the moon & kites
a thousand counterfeits downstream.
These moons pock the creek's dark surface
like tight-packed scales of trout.
The
creek's sudden coinage
spent behind a stand of birch & aspen.
An
image of moon hangs still in the sky
but soon the trout will steal even that.
ii
Where
are you headed with our moon, trout?
Alaska? Japan?
Bring it back! It's the awakening moon:
without it our year won't start;
without it
a wave of darkness will rise to swallow
us.
iii
The trout splits open its belly,
pours out offerings to its god, water,
in darkness behind the swamp-birch.
A few bright fingerlings trickle through,
tickle the underbelly of the new year,
flicker downstream, incite
the cold, dead world to riot.
Because there is a black moon in a white
sky and small black stars
separated by deep white silence because there is a whirlwind to reap and all the sighs
are dull with unuse because the walls of the artery are dying
to meet because no matter how many times you say how many times you cannot
say it enough times because none of the dead has ever really sent back
word because the perineum is such a short trip
from glory-hole to glory-be because a bird lies on its back in snow beneath the bacon fat
hung in muslin from the tree because there is more than one way to skin because terror
is a schism not an ism because Swanky Doodle came to Baghdad
riding a wave of flag-draped vengeance because there is a curve in the middle of a sentence
beyond which no map because Gertrude Stein because
because the opinion of the Only Superpower is beyond Political Manipulation and is self-evidently for the Greater Good of All because there are no questions because there are
no questions didya hear me BECAUSE THERE ARE NO QUESTIONS because we ordered
verbs to go because spring coils up tight in pre-phosphorescent hibernation because hope
recedes in red shadow because the paranoid Polaroid shows no-one lurking in the doorway
and she is unarmed
because there
because here
because the lights of our communities have erased our gods
with their cheap white silence because the infection was air-borne and the air
has already put up with too much
separated by deep white silence because there is a whirlwind to reap and all the sighs
are dull with unuse because the walls of the artery are dying
to meet because no matter how many times you say how many times you cannot
say it enough times because none of the dead has ever really sent back
word because the perineum is such a short trip
from glory-hole to glory-be because a bird lies on its back in snow beneath the bacon fat
hung in muslin from the tree because there is more than one way to skin because terror
is a schism not an ism because Swanky Doodle came to Baghdad
riding a wave of flag-draped vengeance because there is a curve in the middle of a sentence
beyond which no map because Gertrude Stein because
because the opinion of the Only Superpower is beyond Political Manipulation and is self-evidently for the Greater Good of All because there are no questions because there are
no questions didya hear me BECAUSE THERE ARE NO QUESTIONS because we ordered
verbs to go because spring coils up tight in pre-phosphorescent hibernation because hope
recedes in red shadow because the paranoid Polaroid shows no-one lurking in the doorway
and she is unarmed
because there
because here
because the lights of our communities have erased our gods
with their cheap white silence because the infection was air-borne and the air
has already put up with too much
Say someone steps in where there was no-one
where there is no in say this is not
cyberspace not a screened deflection of personality
say there was not a chemical repression say you understood
the phrase marital rubble as used by Hejinian
why Snodgrass had his Hitler say
My failing was my kindness say you can rebuild
as fast as you can rebury the city is always tending
downward no matter how high you go say the phrases
of glass are shot through
with the colourlessness of dirt ground to sand say praise
is always in the mouth of the beholden say you wanted
to change channels in the middle of a conversation say
you did say no-one ever again wanted to colonize
another person say the Beothuk are living
in what innocence ever was
in an undiscoverable fold of the landscape say prime
rib clear cut hard knocks say the planet's
learning curve has plateaued say there's nothing
left say an astronaut came back
with something to say something shot through
with the colour colours came from say no-one
could see it say from where you sit
the word is indivisible an unqualified
seam of immeasurable wealth say the suture job was botched
and we are necrotic tissue congregated at the scar's edge say
the fast ball slides past your startled shoulder say the poet
is flensed through the lens of language becomes the scarecrow's
blind pupil at the sentence's close say nothing
closes until teacher says (1996)
where there is no in say this is not
cyberspace not a screened deflection of personality
say there was not a chemical repression say you understood
the phrase marital rubble as used by Hejinian
why Snodgrass had his Hitler say
My failing was my kindness say you can rebuild
as fast as you can rebury the city is always tending
downward no matter how high you go say the phrases
of glass are shot through
with the colourlessness of dirt ground to sand say praise
is always in the mouth of the beholden say you wanted
to change channels in the middle of a conversation say
you did say no-one ever again wanted to colonize
another person say the Beothuk are living
in what innocence ever was
in an undiscoverable fold of the landscape say prime
rib clear cut hard knocks say the planet's
learning curve has plateaued say there's nothing
left say an astronaut came back
with something to say something shot through
with the colour colours came from say no-one
could see it say from where you sit
the word is indivisible an unqualified
seam of immeasurable wealth say the suture job was botched
and we are necrotic tissue congregated at the scar's edge say
the fast ball slides past your startled shoulder say the poet
is flensed through the lens of language becomes the scarecrow's
blind pupil at the sentence's close say nothing
closes until teacher says (1996)
from The Zeros: Day Book
13.
A little pax-
il: a lot
of peace.
Sylvia's
mother says
resurrection's
a pure chem-
ical fact.
53. The last sin-eater in Shropshire Richard Munslow d. 1906
You mun slow down up ahead there
Dick-Richard
yon malachite's nobbut pawned souls
and calcified angel wings
63.
Greenaway & Phillips
ferry us through Dante's levels
but the colours bleed the words
scholars clog the text
We eject it in favour of
spirited flesh
74. An Ars of Their Poetica.
an abacus of gilt-edged intention
promissory notes of self-interest
from which to stitch a winding sheet
the wax & wane of
ego's last flicker.
99.
Skreek of varied thrush
fluid song of robin
stitch a dawn
out of night's-nothingness
it a-come
through notes’ light gravity
& it all-come
126. Francois' Shrift (Celan)
Both doors of the world
stand open:
opened by you
in the nightgloom.
We hear them bang there and bang there
and bear the unknowable
and bear the green shoot into your Alwaysing.
263.
She has attained Listening Face
and cracks neither smirk nor smile.
while her husband's
Falling Into Place
barely escapes
the derailing of imagination
by explanation:
water spares
the parched throat but windfalls
drop into slower places than water
falls.
Survivors rise from a wreck
piece fragments into fragments.
Instruction: when the page is white,
Margaret, we all change voices.
13.
A little pax-
il: a lot
of peace.
Sylvia's
mother says
resurrection's
a pure chem-
ical fact.
53. The last sin-eater in Shropshire Richard Munslow d. 1906
You mun slow down up ahead there
Dick-Richard
yon malachite's nobbut pawned souls
and calcified angel wings
63.
Greenaway & Phillips
ferry us through Dante's levels
but the colours bleed the words
scholars clog the text
We eject it in favour of
spirited flesh
74. An Ars of Their Poetica.
an abacus of gilt-edged intention
promissory notes of self-interest
from which to stitch a winding sheet
the wax & wane of
ego's last flicker.
99.
Skreek of varied thrush
fluid song of robin
stitch a dawn
out of night's-nothingness
it a-come
through notes’ light gravity
& it all-come
126. Francois' Shrift (Celan)
Both doors of the world
stand open:
opened by you
in the nightgloom.
We hear them bang there and bang there
and bear the unknowable
and bear the green shoot into your Alwaysing.
263.
She has attained Listening Face
and cracks neither smirk nor smile.
while her husband's
Falling Into Place
barely escapes
the derailing of imagination
by explanation:
water spares
the parched throat but windfalls
drop into slower places than water
falls.
Survivors rise from a wreck
piece fragments into fragments.
Instruction: when the page is white,
Margaret, we all change voices.
ANTHROPOCENTRIC POETICS 101
The face of it sat by the fireplace
and flexed.
Memoranda from HQ
were confusing so freeze seemed
the better part of uncertainty
and uncertainty knew one thing.
In such cosiness
Descartes found himself
proposing his eponymous dualism. Having no-one
to converse with he split himself into
subject and object
and went out crying
in the wilderness, preparing the way,
apparently, for B.F. Skinner.
Any nature
worth its salt will have a blind tendril
worm its way out of the box
to wilt and flourish
in spectral air.
It is the nature of things
to quietly stay put
and await
their metaphoric incarnation.
The face of it sat by the fireplace
and flexed.
Memoranda from HQ
were confusing so freeze seemed
the better part of uncertainty
and uncertainty knew one thing.
In such cosiness
Descartes found himself
proposing his eponymous dualism. Having no-one
to converse with he split himself into
subject and object
and went out crying
in the wilderness, preparing the way,
apparently, for B.F. Skinner.
Any nature
worth its salt will have a blind tendril
worm its way out of the box
to wilt and flourish
in spectral air.
It is the nature of things
to quietly stay put
and await
their metaphoric incarnation.
A FINE AND PUBLIC PLACE
i
In a heartbeat there'd be a block and a pass
and no escape. A heavy tackle could beckon
the sirens and weeks awarded with a nightgown
tied behind. Bed-rest: ordered. Compliance to go.
Sign my chart and I'll don a straitened jacket, smile into
the mouth of an unsuspecting stooge. If all the world's
staged what's the rest but curtained silence, a hide
for a writer of headlines to project eponymous increase?
Prophet: a man who gains from loss. If it doesn't happen
in the margins, it doesn't. Surgical division: behavior
modification by stealth: perseverations of dead air.
ii. Edengate.
They say there's a level at which you will find a playing field
where lovers dive for cover over clover.
There's no need for that, you say,
and there isn't. For an American declension, try:
I litigate; you pay; he/she/it pays. We all pay
the piper and the cotton plugs that ease our passage
to the other side: no leaks & even fewer secrets.
Whether the Expulsion was a strike or lock-out
is a debate hardly begun in earnest, yet,
in Texas, a branch was consumed in its own rhetoric.
Where there's fire there's someone smoking to get out
of there: orbit or obit?
A nice discrimination: ash, dust.
Paradise debased.
iii. Fly-by-night.
Tucks & stitches come away:
aging more recess than process,
more skinflint than burn-out.
Crow's feet where no crow ever:
beak-marks hidden in the pupil,
tunnel the years leak through.
The job landed, its perks & wage,
refunds your parents for years of strut
on the catwalk, the snarl of prissy,
the scratch-your-eyes-out glares
at their deep ignorance. Sex, the fun
the hormones factor in, lubricates life
at school, at weekends. Winks &
pinches, piracy. Pity your parents
outside the circus-ring: the ring-
master's luminous nosegay lights
your way home - night-scented flocks,
evening primrose, flecked with dried
underaged drinkers' vomit. The party's
now camped in the parahippocampal
cortex. Or some loop of that loop.
iv. Time's Nick.
Cradle a moment: it will lullay you
into a false sense of curity,
make the chaos too tabular (wooden)
to trust. When raising a truss
has ceased to be an act of faith as to wrap
God in black leather quarto is to
contain nothing: the questions from whirlwind
deserve better than to be answered.
Is and was are line-dance might-have-beens
in-steps stepping out on the off-beat -
syncopation nation
and a pay-back song from birthday brother
Marley. Flyers & catalogues
& discarded ephemera will engage teams
of speculative researchers in reconstructing
our times: a list of objects to conjure
the whit of a subject. "I'm just popping
in here for a quick one," he nodded
his head toward the Mother Earth's Arms.
"Aye," she said, "'appen I'll join you later."
i
In a heartbeat there'd be a block and a pass
and no escape. A heavy tackle could beckon
the sirens and weeks awarded with a nightgown
tied behind. Bed-rest: ordered. Compliance to go.
Sign my chart and I'll don a straitened jacket, smile into
the mouth of an unsuspecting stooge. If all the world's
staged what's the rest but curtained silence, a hide
for a writer of headlines to project eponymous increase?
Prophet: a man who gains from loss. If it doesn't happen
in the margins, it doesn't. Surgical division: behavior
modification by stealth: perseverations of dead air.
ii. Edengate.
They say there's a level at which you will find a playing field
where lovers dive for cover over clover.
There's no need for that, you say,
and there isn't. For an American declension, try:
I litigate; you pay; he/she/it pays. We all pay
the piper and the cotton plugs that ease our passage
to the other side: no leaks & even fewer secrets.
Whether the Expulsion was a strike or lock-out
is a debate hardly begun in earnest, yet,
in Texas, a branch was consumed in its own rhetoric.
Where there's fire there's someone smoking to get out
of there: orbit or obit?
A nice discrimination: ash, dust.
Paradise debased.
iii. Fly-by-night.
Tucks & stitches come away:
aging more recess than process,
more skinflint than burn-out.
Crow's feet where no crow ever:
beak-marks hidden in the pupil,
tunnel the years leak through.
The job landed, its perks & wage,
refunds your parents for years of strut
on the catwalk, the snarl of prissy,
the scratch-your-eyes-out glares
at their deep ignorance. Sex, the fun
the hormones factor in, lubricates life
at school, at weekends. Winks &
pinches, piracy. Pity your parents
outside the circus-ring: the ring-
master's luminous nosegay lights
your way home - night-scented flocks,
evening primrose, flecked with dried
underaged drinkers' vomit. The party's
now camped in the parahippocampal
cortex. Or some loop of that loop.
iv. Time's Nick.
Cradle a moment: it will lullay you
into a false sense of curity,
make the chaos too tabular (wooden)
to trust. When raising a truss
has ceased to be an act of faith as to wrap
God in black leather quarto is to
contain nothing: the questions from whirlwind
deserve better than to be answered.
Is and was are line-dance might-have-beens
in-steps stepping out on the off-beat -
syncopation nation
and a pay-back song from birthday brother
Marley. Flyers & catalogues
& discarded ephemera will engage teams
of speculative researchers in reconstructing
our times: a list of objects to conjure
the whit of a subject. "I'm just popping
in here for a quick one," he nodded
his head toward the Mother Earth's Arms.
"Aye," she said, "'appen I'll join you later."
ORDER OF DEAD.
i.
Rochester Illingworth of Coventry
30th March, 1909, 60 years
left bound
in black leather, looking kindly
upon us.
ii.
I AM refuge to another.
Mountains seep past night.
Sleep-grass green and withered.
Angry days, years told.
Teach us to numb our days.
Wisdom us with glad comfort and prosper.
iii.
Now put down his feet.
Some body seed.
Image of earthly, image of heavenly, all change.
This mortal put on: this sting of law.
iv.
The commitment of call away.
The soul of ash
this never-home.
i.
Rochester Illingworth of Coventry
30th March, 1909, 60 years
left bound
in black leather, looking kindly
upon us.
ii.
I AM refuge to another.
Mountains seep past night.
Sleep-grass green and withered.
Angry days, years told.
Teach us to numb our days.
Wisdom us with glad comfort and prosper.
iii.
Now put down his feet.
Some body seed.
Image of earthly, image of heavenly, all change.
This mortal put on: this sting of law.
iv.
The commitment of call away.
The soul of ash
this never-home.
SAUL IN THE DETAILS.
The signal was perseverative: a flash card
in morose code - a depressive knows
a psychotic by his handshake.
You must have behaviour to meet
the criteria: what else is a DSM for?
His shrink is a rock wrapped in insight:
empathy is not now covered. Can we
call it MediCareless after the baboon’s
heart mislaid the baby’s soul? Saul
in the mind: Paul in intent. Swollen
Members would have had a 12-inch
on their CV but the CD usurped them.
Is that hop, hip, rip, rap or an oily film
left by the incumbent? Gouge
the earth, O gouge the earth
and crawl thereon. Scrawled in crayon
on the belly of a 747
THIS SIDE OOPS: an act of treason
as to ruinate anagrams a leak
in the plumbing. As straight as that.
No straighter. No, straighter.
All chaste. When the lion pounced
the grenade blew Monday a hole
through Sunday. Raw roar; rank gong.
Inter mission: Burial Detail, fall in.
The signal was perseverative: a flash card
in morose code - a depressive knows
a psychotic by his handshake.
You must have behaviour to meet
the criteria: what else is a DSM for?
His shrink is a rock wrapped in insight:
empathy is not now covered. Can we
call it MediCareless after the baboon’s
heart mislaid the baby’s soul? Saul
in the mind: Paul in intent. Swollen
Members would have had a 12-inch
on their CV but the CD usurped them.
Is that hop, hip, rip, rap or an oily film
left by the incumbent? Gouge
the earth, O gouge the earth
and crawl thereon. Scrawled in crayon
on the belly of a 747
THIS SIDE OOPS: an act of treason
as to ruinate anagrams a leak
in the plumbing. As straight as that.
No straighter. No, straighter.
All chaste. When the lion pounced
the grenade blew Monday a hole
through Sunday. Raw roar; rank gong.
Inter mission: Burial Detail, fall in.
Time On My Hands (You... )
for Billie Holiday
A cicada's ear-drum
is a concordance
of brush-strokes
& silence
its nerve system
a hive
of honeyed
pleasures
O, give it to us,
as long as the notes last,
straight
from the belly
for Billie Holiday
A cicada's ear-drum
is a concordance
of brush-strokes
& silence
its nerve system
a hive
of honeyed
pleasures
O, give it to us,
as long as the notes last,
straight
from the belly
NAOMI: A MIDRASH
for my daughter, Hannah Naomi
Because she gleaned the riched man's fields for their ripe excess
& winnowed & ground it down to palatable dry biscuits as befit
our station, & because she all-foured beneath his table for the crumbs
that fibred our sluggish bowels, & because she followed his beckoning
finger's power-curve to a spot beneath his trophy-blanket,
& because his friends reframed all this into the heroics of the Kinsman-
Redeemer, I must shout it from the middle of this field of stubble: she,
with her othering righteousness, cropped by scribes to disembodied type,
did kindnesses, for which she's misremembered, out of a single heart, one
on one. That's what she did: daughter, self-grafted root to root.
Her emptiness, my emptiness. I peopled her imagination with ancestors:
she mine with descendants.
Like kin. Kith. Simile raised to the metonymic
by builders of nations: those monsters. I say a nation's a bloodbath
siphoned from a shallow grave. Leeches: patriarchs, historians. Stitched
into a sampler, her kindness was red heart on sand-brown background.
for my daughter, Hannah Naomi
Because she gleaned the riched man's fields for their ripe excess
& winnowed & ground it down to palatable dry biscuits as befit
our station, & because she all-foured beneath his table for the crumbs
that fibred our sluggish bowels, & because she followed his beckoning
finger's power-curve to a spot beneath his trophy-blanket,
& because his friends reframed all this into the heroics of the Kinsman-
Redeemer, I must shout it from the middle of this field of stubble: she,
with her othering righteousness, cropped by scribes to disembodied type,
did kindnesses, for which she's misremembered, out of a single heart, one
on one. That's what she did: daughter, self-grafted root to root.
Her emptiness, my emptiness. I peopled her imagination with ancestors:
she mine with descendants.
Like kin. Kith. Simile raised to the metonymic
by builders of nations: those monsters. I say a nation's a bloodbath
siphoned from a shallow grave. Leeches: patriarchs, historians. Stitched
into a sampler, her kindness was red heart on sand-brown background.
from LITERARY INDUSTRY
He Said/She Said
He said she had a paper soul she folded
and tore holes in and opened out with flourish
into a ragged Star of David. He said
this Gentile's psyche took on, whenever wronged,
the stigmata, not of the cross but the camps,
so others would know the pure depths of her pain.
She said the world betrays and the hell-flames lick
because of you and you and you and you.
Well, that's often the way it is with poets,
they'll nail their angst to the nearest
catastrophe and sentence enemies
to duke it out with demons in Dante's hell.
Her own hell bloomed, a last metaphor failed;
hyacinth accomplishment; hatred perfected.
She
left a ring of ash where her lips unmanned him,
a bee-sting in reverse, spat him out into chimneyed air,
unfeathered, crow-black, with circumsized soul.
He Said/She Said
He said she had a paper soul she folded
and tore holes in and opened out with flourish
into a ragged Star of David. He said
this Gentile's psyche took on, whenever wronged,
the stigmata, not of the cross but the camps,
so others would know the pure depths of her pain.
She said the world betrays and the hell-flames lick
because of you and you and you and you.
Well, that's often the way it is with poets,
they'll nail their angst to the nearest
catastrophe and sentence enemies
to duke it out with demons in Dante's hell.
Her own hell bloomed, a last metaphor failed;
hyacinth accomplishment; hatred perfected.
She
left a ring of ash where her lips unmanned him,
a bee-sting in reverse, spat him out into chimneyed air,
unfeathered, crow-black, with circumsized soul.
AN ORANGE SARDINE
There was nothing so much as a name among them
& questions marred the air while daiquiris danced.
Paint dripped abstractedly
outside the grid. One block north,
two east, the new aesthetes practised their movement.
Everything was up
for erasure except the signature.
A critic, a magazine. A mag, a critic
& a room full of glow-in-the-dark fortune cookies.
A nuclear future & a dissolve of personal responsibilities,
a reuptake of polis, ethos & hubris
making it new, saying it made.
A headline or two helps push the poem forward
into unknown margins.
Drift marches
& form shifts: in the cross-light
a megacritic crowns the age's voice -
crowd-like noises exit stage left.
The laurelled clown strikes the heroic,
stretches his ironic pitch, feather-stitches her nest
with a sardonic fibre of oracular tensity
etc etc ...
Back at the Lazy O, words graze on racks & ribs,
casualties of some beach-boogy bonanza:
and in the Capitol
the Voice ventriloquises gravity:
larynx aligned with coccyx
the way Kafka rhymes with laughter.
There was nothing so much as a name among them
& questions marred the air while daiquiris danced.
Paint dripped abstractedly
outside the grid. One block north,
two east, the new aesthetes practised their movement.
Everything was up
for erasure except the signature.
A critic, a magazine. A mag, a critic
& a room full of glow-in-the-dark fortune cookies.
A nuclear future & a dissolve of personal responsibilities,
a reuptake of polis, ethos & hubris
making it new, saying it made.
A headline or two helps push the poem forward
into unknown margins.
Drift marches
& form shifts: in the cross-light
a megacritic crowns the age's voice -
crowd-like noises exit stage left.
The laurelled clown strikes the heroic,
stretches his ironic pitch, feather-stitches her nest
with a sardonic fibre of oracular tensity
etc etc ...
Back at the Lazy O, words graze on racks & ribs,
casualties of some beach-boogy bonanza:
and in the Capitol
the Voice ventriloquises gravity:
larynx aligned with coccyx
the way Kafka rhymes with laughter.
LIKE
(out of VFT's Marcelin
Pleynet)
even words blind clarity
some vision pierced matter
you hear books listening
understand words
like a stylus of colours
a paradox of impediment
a woman a vision asleep
already naked her tremble possesses her
we hold back like overcoats
speak some exposed poetry
everyday language like tall tedium
sticking to word-dust
the alignment of that chill
like the golden founders of absent title
for sake of write it down
She/He speak unequal pain
white scope spoken
this disturbed her eyes
a coat crossing
the street
a burnt cross
imagine a line on black light
so speak
open a catch in the threshold
a well an alley a wall
the other side
see the poem turn
desire
like pain pierces touch
yellow caress like masked spite
only writing allowed
say
* * * * * * *
The butterfly whose banking whirl
and dive for pollen
dominoed the storm that blew
Chernobyl ash over Europe's crops,
it's true, is mounted on the wall
of the son of a Nazi escapee
in Chile; but look with care,
reader, the whorl at your finger's tip
is woven into the pattern on his wing.
even words blind clarity
some vision pierced matter
you hear books listening
understand words
like a stylus of colours
a paradox of impediment
a woman a vision asleep
already naked her tremble possesses her
we hold back like overcoats
speak some exposed poetry
everyday language like tall tedium
sticking to word-dust
the alignment of that chill
like the golden founders of absent title
for sake of write it down
She/He speak unequal pain
white scope spoken
this disturbed her eyes
a coat crossing
the street
a burnt cross
imagine a line on black light
so speak
open a catch in the threshold
a well an alley a wall
the other side
see the poem turn
desire
like pain pierces touch
yellow caress like masked spite
only writing allowed
say
* * * * * * *
The butterfly whose banking whirl
and dive for pollen
dominoed the storm that blew
Chernobyl ash over Europe's crops,
it's true, is mounted on the wall
of the son of a Nazi escapee
in Chile; but look with care,
reader, the whorl at your finger's tip
is woven into the pattern on his wing.
& OUT
Political correctness has me in its iron
y tight chastity belt
ed right out of left feld
spar socketing corpse's eye
teeth for a projectile brain
storm on the horizon
tal edge where the realpolitik
al animal slavers at the public
ity trough. Charity's off
loaded to the dead
letter depot
med will cure
all
Political correctness has me in its iron
y tight chastity belt
ed right out of left feld
spar socketing corpse's eye
teeth for a projectile brain
storm on the horizon
tal edge where the realpolitik
al animal slavers at the public
ity trough. Charity's off
loaded to the dead
letter depot
med will cure
all
Paradise
Debased
Copyright © Pete
Smith 2008
