(1+1)+(1+1)=22 A Collaborative Poem Issue 02, Part II - Language & Image
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I’m never going to author words that sound like music in a bag “Poet’s Oath” or grammar stones wrapped in newsletters. I’ll cover me in paper leaves, lull me gently, ink my wires and either I’ll become a microcosm of re-imagined senses or, I swear, I’ll turn into a perfectly tuned clock. clocks beat “Perpetual Time” the metronomes
hands smack the twelfth hour
chimes ring profanities
perpetual time waits for no one
anticipation tightens the noose There are no autumn leaves here “LES FEUILLES MORTES” where green fronds fall to death every day from every tree and vine on this tropical line set to zero, and so Mercer’s metaphor of periodic loss wreaks the way you sing it since all our verses, all our stanzas, all our falling, all our missing most of all, my darling, has no one season. Nothing but green and brown grass “Impressions” long grass tall grass long tall grass
grows growing—I step out am stepping-- we all step smash trod on the fallen tree
infant human birth I give birth to the green grass but some some of the grass brown
a giant leaf leaves footprints in the grass a snake maybe a snake
impression your impression
circles swirling folding blowing in the wind
if you blow your candles out you can see more clearly in the dark. My face became a giant question mark “Ativan Poem #6: Pond” and a thousand birds flew out of my mouth and over the pond in a great murmuration. I had no answers; I had no turtle comfort. arms woven around “dwell” my torso, twiggy, leafy, waiting for bits of down, gum wrappers, odd seed pods leaving softness and character. i am handmade. sometimes when it hurts i ooze, shapeless, a snail into the smooth inside of my skull, iridescent patterns in stripes like the beach, smooth, after the waves have ebbed with the sun going down that i will never see. maybe you can look inside after i am gone, leave me hollow up let the crows pick it clean a nest cup left for a song bird in which its children might sing. Last night’s bird orchestra “4:30AM” is tuning up for a second show. The tiny lights click on over the branches where the chickadees and titmice practice trills and runs by some little known German composer. Good and bad are twins brothers “Evil and Good, 1” lost & found on a see-saw. A crossroad with no signs. The abandoned barn where you spend the night.
Candle is unlit on the table. A full basket of eggs some light pink some blue. Bed is made with white sheets and dark blankets.
In the distance a bell strikes the hour. You hear but you cannot count.
Your mouth moves fast as an eye tracking rain “Attention Dislocation Order” or the rapid writing of a word thief for Rebecca Mae Holder in a library corner. I wonder, “How many blinks are in your sentence-thoughts?” When I write, it’s to moments by the window. It’s slow as circumscribing the world island by undiscovered island, sometimes the wind blows and hurries me along. In other words, no matter how far I seem, I return to read your eyes between the blinks. This vessel of breaking “Level with a Body” down vesicle vehicle vessel of breaking down the moors the cape blue the vase valise vessel of breaking down wonderful vassal and night tonight I can write the vessel of breaking down rights itself or blue or vacillation between well and not between sense and non between empty and full the vesselofbreakingdown or moon and then there’s neither full nor empty but gone no vessel then no breaking breakers the sea loosed lost and no way of ever knowing it again Imagine the prairie upside down— “II. Martini, Bitters, Cocktail” grasses feeding roots rather than the other way round--
no head-high flames to sweep unchecked across bluestem, dropseed, or stiff goldenrod
no cycle of loss and renewal rebirthing flowers, bitter weeds, mega-fauna or the ubiquitous lead-plant shrubs, but if Aristotle believed the heart was the organ of thought & sensation, didn’t he predict Duchamp’s urinal? Can art be the object itself? No? Where do you draw the line? —at Warhol? Yes? Because his Brillo Box was a made thing?—an artwork identical to the object which is different? In the light that ages “Nord” within the eyes’ incense the brushland of the area of the Northern gaze on the moment of spasms is flaming with the smell of burned hair Shocks in my nervous “Pulse” system a syringe breaches my open wound.
Whenever I think it’s healed I’m wrong.
Shards of shrapnel detected by airport security.
A bomb exploding in my arteries. It is a sullen world that drapes “Bitter’s Ratio” the heart with ash, portends the loss of sunlight, tastes bitter on the tongue—words turned by severed hands, burn the eye.
Burn the eye, severed hands turn words on the tongue, taste bitter. Sunlight’s loss portends the ashen heart, drapes a sullen world. A big screen TV “Magenta, Black, Green on Orange” behind a green mat
bathtub full of squid ink lined with towel
or: My kid could draw that. People weep before these?
Too many antidepressants cancel out: razored arm on kitchen floor buried disinterred reburied with wife
a metaphor for what the Chinese call the dirt grave of love. In arid elsewhere, “OTHERWHERE” musical bones leak melodies, released
by nuclear wind. Gray leaves sprout, confuse corrosive heat
for spring. The horizon slices Otherwhere.
Acidic as an aquatint, sun etches inhabitants
who delight in hearing wounds’ laughter. The absurdity of the world “Symbiosis” is in me is in it I live earthquake dreams cru m ble c rum ble I dream through reality dream walker I breathe its pollution carcinogenic effluence cough up spurious assurances phlegmulous lies cohabiting lies inside me nurture me their origin unknown from somebody and nobody they were always in me symbiotes I am because they appeared unto me and announced my Phlegmaculate Conception Something musty: shoulders head thoughts. “Into Glowing (The Brooding)” Boots span love sagging god skulking horizon. The past is repast for worms: hair eyes fingertips eternity late thrown shimmering bone weak ocean god rhythm something dripping.
Bats in air impress ages pierce horned moon break edges of gold shadows shake late afternoons surface to feed usher darkness.
White moon always stretches between stale shadows and sun on ground like fire waves overtaking concrete smashing it into glowing shards. Psychedelic dust “Dust on a vision of hell” spiking starfish eyes
Liquid claws rasping (like windows) on the cusp of absence
The cacophony of bones dissolving into technicolor bells
The dissolution of dust, in technicolor absence: liquid bones, cacophonous claws, stars fishing for bells on window’s psychedelic cusp
woke nearly every “I went roaming in my mind.” hour summers into snow cold and darknesses
quiet rains difficult space
a form in flight from itself
one admits light as one (other) (self) entrances oxygen nitrogen into tremble shiver
the hello of living
lights upon creatures which is not the light of the sky on the one moon that runs us
The light gradually eats away at my face. “We Never Really Die” (Images steal the curvature.) Eye for an “I” until it is eaten? (Forgetfulness is indistinct and uncertain.) Mark this page, I ask him. “Light is a question in one millimeter answers.” I do and I relinquish the space. it’s happening again “Dandelion Whizz”
the high lonesome feeling I get when she pees
a blue streak to the moon
floating on wind like dandelion fluff in May.
The word probably “In Conclusion” defines the image an eagle watching a setting sun the season winter so all the reds overtake white mist rising.
