Category: My Poetry

Anti-tercets

Written in Seattle, Washington.

Will I forget

like the wings

between the trees

of hobbit-ville

Maine, wings of flies

covered in fire,

the darkness

once absolute

still so still

a covering up

and bundling away.

 

*

 

I write

to cushion the fall

to Jason

or for him.

Don’t know the difference

but he would if he saw this

and read it as a question

which it wouldn’t be

isn’t so

the language too fierce,

the moment in my eyes

sizing up consciousness

like a beautiful balloon.

 

*

 

In my realm of zeroing in

there’s the realm and the zero.

Within and inside and inward.

The breath and the belief

and the slightest insanity

of a beautiful, bulging system.

 

In my realms of the laughter of the sun

who’s committing a grueling improv

otherwise defined as impromptu commitment

sequence of, pattern of, surreptitious

this laughter the setting instance to

and the ritualistic flail-dance for

we exhibit and sit and provocate.

 

In any realms there’s the taint at the source.

Imagine the clearest streaming gleam

cowering crystalline in the bluest wash.

Light falls over the flagged perfection.

Notifications burden us in our stance and will.

And the touring core, the sizzling heart,

a whisper gently scraped by dutiful reality.

 

We communicate with tongues of steel and granite.

Primitive engagement with a loss of feeling.

The overwhelming placement of the infinity of cortisol.

It reaches like corruption through the death of legends.

Humorous moments shadow ill-humored momentums.

 

The spatial glances of hanging pots while I write this.

Hallucinations of crooks and stagnant loss of memory.

This is as inside as insidious a spoken literature

and the glass grows deeper, incessant, torched by dark.

 

*

 

Whether we dream it within the firs and mosses,

or it is a god damn lie, I will still regret it.

 

*

 

The lances required to take us into homeward territory

ache and scream with rouge infection and craned joints.

 

*

 

A knowledge captured by Ponge rests itself in Seattle spring.

The weather colder and extreme and regretful and upright, alive.

 

*

 

Is Taco Tuesday in the midnight of the beard that threatens this table?

Is the threat to this table a justified service otherwise untranslatable?

 

*

 

I’m watching Paul read American Sentences to comatose students.

 

*

 

Kanye tweets about and to creatives

the way serpents hiss and scroll.

 

*

 

Is it Athena’s face here in the Belltown core?

People live their lives here and see it daily.

 

*

 

Liquor tax and I’m reminded again,

yet again, of America’s inability.

If we felt less anxiety

sitting ivory in the crumbled, crimped towers / pasted fingers bloodied by their own repetition

Written on 1/23/18.

Written at Nectar, in Seattle.

This Is It