Posts for June 11, 2023 (page 6)

There’s this strangely flesh-toned tape left suturing
crazing glass of the shell of a clam-dug Scub-Rats
                        elbowed a skull or so over on Main St.
              (over that sun-eaten sea nymph’s face still
               traced across wrinkling canvas, graven, offended,
               and simpering), coyly recalling
a frog conducting Mahler’s Sixth or something,
raising a gangly hand
to summon the slugs
  of a death march plundering stubborn Montmartre
   and bruising the Louvre to a floppily foppish saloon,
    and the arch awarded donned
     with a measure of drooling tule, the seams ripped
      reading,
                     Laissez les bons temps rouler!
                       available now
                           at Rally’s.

Grain-finished flowers
I’d never remember the names of
        dripping from slouching sills
and the sun still
                             svelte and freckled, blushing
the cherubic gold of the moon it’d usually scalded
blue and a sharply contracting black,
just some scarce hours shy of its
glower grown heavy and high enough, biting,
a rasp arced righting the new-chewn nails rough nights had
ruined, so hot and bothered it’s throttling scabs in the concrete—
slumberous muses rave as they
slip through the shades of Apollo’s pillars,
communing with frogspawn,
urging from squirming froth
some sizzling sailor’s song
interred among sea foam;

the feathering smile of sewage that skips across
pockmarked stone, the slumping firs who
woo and bewilder the dry-washed crows bent
gingerly combing the sky clean, twisted
street signs rambling, vine and woodland,
door rewritten again and again until
words refuse their illumining sinew;
Central, Park, Catalpa, Sycamore,
Limestone sucked to a puckering pulp,
the gravel no more than the dross of a dollop of
hardtack hacked through a powdery copse of
kelp that finicky, meek, and unwieldy
seas refused, marooned, and ruined,
wan plop of a groschen forged
from a rock-hammered bottle cap
snaps at the scratched and leaf-rasped throat
of a scrofulous public pool—
                                                                  a man
at a distance
                        slopped on an ebonied crutch, then
knelt and lowered a metal detector, chewing
a trowel through atoning roots for a sou
or a spoon or a tungsten ring some meddling
rook had abandoned, fixed in a twisted experiment;
then yet a man
                            with a hat like mine
removing the troubling trimmings from stunted shrubs;
a man with an emptied pram coercing a merciless
                            how d’you do;
the sky scrubbed
                            wan as a sandy gesso, and,
one more thing, before I punch the clock and
tickle the timpani taut as a teardrop, hugging
the chalk-wan cheek of a lacquered pall— just

children squealing and scuttling like
cartoonish soap bubbles brushed from Jumbo, Jr.,
tickling streets to a shameless, ageless, easy and teasing smile

after Cocteau

A smoke stack crumbles.
A line sketch speaks.

The poet is a grid of wires
kissing the mouth on his palm.
He turns beauty into a marble stone
and throws it through a window
onto a stack of young bones.

Gamblers carry on
over the bodies of children
until the last card is dealt.

The poet smashes the stone
with a heavy mallet
until he himself is stone.

He cracks and falls apart
like snow mounds in the sun,
sinking into the earth.

What Were You Wearing?
That is the name
Of an exhibit
Displaying clothing worn
At the time of a rape or assault.

It is a common question
Asked about the
Victim.
For, of course, they
Invited the assault.

If you go to the
Exhibit,
It’s clear there is no
Set or defined appropriate attire
For assault.

So … one might as well
Dress
However you want.
For assault
Is not your fault.

But our society
Blames the victim.
Otherwise,
Anyone, at any time, in
Any attire, might be assaulted.

And THAT is not Appropriate.

after Steven Brown

There are cows everywhere
and crickets. I often wonder about
thousands of them in the woods, permanently
fed-up. They’re out there, fields of dry grass
or dark pine, owners of nothing
who’ve got it all.

All this articulation

Early morning, there’s 

no such thing as exhaustion

on the side porch.

You will fall asleep in the velvety cove of a steer’s ear.
What happens when a muscle tightens
and steels and dries like a
stubborn desert butte?

Hemingway claimed 
every man has two deaths: 
in the dirt, then in the minds — 
I raise him a third: 

my being amounts to five feet, 
my things, likely a five by five room, 

but my hair clings to combs, carpets, clothes,
my sloughed-off cells swirl in dust, 
my sweat and spit stick 
to grass blades and pillow cases, 
bike chains and mug rims, 

my nail indents sit in pins, pen caps, stress balls, 
my blood resides in sink pipes,
my fingerprints linger
on table edges and book pages,
flower stems and light switches.  

The heavens marked my departure, 
nature nesting my ends and starts,
and as the earth holds me, 
as you once held me and I held you, 
I owe the earth my embrace;

though I may stay a skeleton under stones, 
my name, a whisper in scant memories, 

trust, Hemingway, 
that my touch is tethered: 
in dirt, minds, and indents — 
I persist in echoes. 

The poet found a seat on a train going somewhere, nods to her muse.

Write before midnight.
Express what comes from your mind;
Insert and unwind.