a literary magazine.
four poems...
Cosmo-Futurist Nurse Log
Overheard at the KSW Colloquium in Vancouver
“I put the God
in glaze, but isn’t
technology evil?”
or a ‘see reverse’
of feeling inhering
aversal. Ghost-fordist
underlined and struck-thru.
“hella animals,
leave your hills”, &
sculpting down I follow,
fleeing inconvenience
into hyperlinks
“The Internet of Things”
streams like a dream,
what’s seen thru a stuttering screen
turns how everything seen is.
This twisting has a pleasant feeling
a subtle misaffection,
it says
to a glass – “pour”
into discrepancy,
describes into wrung hands.
I don’t have anything to say
that isn’t obvious.
You look from the faded
tones numerous in
wet white fields
that flicker between handwriting.
Creative professions playing frisbee
on the sustainable park lawn.
“I have ethical issues”
but it’s hard
to try
harder than that,
the game’s gains are momentary,
a fortuitous bounce
in the untied stakes of amnesia
during an affliction year
we rhetoric to keep.
This rings ajar in the ear.
“Depend on proof or faith”
both’re scummy & commodious,
this city’s housed,
their absent body’s decomposition.
You want a tattoo of yourself
showing your tattoo
to others, I repress
licking the sweat
off your plans
(I don’t even like you),
but in turn,
I do this fun thing:
jump off a badass building
for people. Red Bull. A falling
forward in every frame;
dream highways to yesterday’s futures.
I saw a conversation between
one person and his phone.
Two dark forms in darkening
repetition.
And then I saw the horizon
Lit before the keel
Branches Without Limits
Alone, my isolated maturity
limps through loopholes, paralyzed
by the first fruits of long boots.
You will need further steps to cross an ocean:
Even the engulfment stretches unmeasured
like the freshest ricegrounds in
a swamp teeming with securities, or
a tropical equity for the prince
of plants. A house without shortage grinds nine
generations to cloth. Feverishly,
the canals tramping through the glades.
We emerged looking different from when we entered,
when before tore at our every muscle and sinew.
The serpent in her agony
absorbed every drop of venom,
but it only quenched a slight degree
of her thirst for living sleep.
On night shift, you suffer some who sleep unwell
or do without, their line could be drawn
over iron-heavy eyelids ruined
to make steel, a pretext smelting.
Like pottery moulded empty, pulmonary,
our machine was always generous or worse.
Last winter I used to cry with sore feet
to and fro through snow for I could not leave
it to stop. Oil to the wheel, intellect
of thieves, agitator against the night,
I rolled a sack under me, another
rolled up as a pillow, I sleep few hours,
every evening belonging to the next
morning.
Revived by supplies of coffee,
I dragged myself from a squalid bed,
telling day from night by the light’s sparks
before the sun. This guiding star is your lead.
With sun in hand, panting for revenge from the light,
fanatical automation punched through the day,
an avalanche of encroachments wrung shrewd
from the stunning noise and turmoil, halting
before pleasurehounds, their legions suffering
on pivot’s swindle, to fall like gold
from a showerhead.
Their shortened string
lengthens into a mess of dark intervals,
noon meat in winter, at ease with leaves
Like disease, leaving us weakly untouched,
We have been cradled completely.
Heaving the Paving
We were then shattered into grief by a dismemberment fiasco. All the people were there: the ruling jackals, the real-estate moguls, upper management parrots, lynx-eyed plutocrats, stock exchange sharks, protectionist eagles and bullish free traders, priests and progressives, young whores and old nuns, and even small business owners - what other kinds are there? An open revolt against the abjectly powerless that risked nothing.
Imagine, living a week
off a reputation for citation
and emerging sufficiently obstinate,
with a trite remark in your mouth. Adage
for adversity, debt against leisure,
your blunt ingenuity would drudge at
any common good to dissolve it while
extirpating paupers in asylum’s
walls. Neat. An ideal withers for your show.
The flesh angels appear without their hands,
thronging, stunted and unripe,
their bones lock jawed, half-starved
of discharge from abscesses, cobwebs, dead
black beetles, putrid yeast, its stomach baked
ill-shaped, ill-formed, and bloodless,
a shorter body in soil, one kept from
the light of breath is best, so says
the measureless drive pressed to vital lengths.
In horror, you cling to letters so you don’t have
to look, you stay unregulated - but cooly disdain
a cloud of circulars in protest.
yet tribunals of introversion tell you
that nothing is amiss - summoning yourself
before yourself for commendation - can a bench
of farces ever be fallible?
So say the stipends of longing.
The wilder the rage of the mob of managers,
the more soothing the noise of commercials
in agitation, the more a child will lose
its nerve to enter adulthood, throwing
all eight of her years beneath the wheels
of operation.
Let the young drudge through refreshment,
their time teems with impossibility,
while the old and scandalous blossom
unpunished. Footed with children, the mothers
stoke fires with no fantasy,
but the struggle to wake from one, Being owed
eight years retrogression as concession.
Bringing them belonging with pleasant names,
the gilded pill is given, and they are
bidden to burden in stone-like veils,
their privation portions dwindling,
silk howling on stools, seignorial
for the lightness of their fingers.
They lurk in the background, resistant
yet hand-in-hand, the weakest eyes
became bleach and dye,
lace and stockings, earthenware
and matches, percussion-caps,
cartridges, carpets and fustian cuttings.
Shreds of enforced idleness, attraction
hounded through scattered sheds
as an actor for an uncommented cameo,
the unctuous heart dripping with
the milk of kindness, enriching
the highest exchequer.
Enthusiastically seize meaninglessness.
Reduction is the function of seduction.
Beefliver on Mangoes
Or cantaloupe enveloping a squash
In day undo the dirt
underneath numb nails, they
hold holes where
carrots and turnips
were, their contour
like a rhinoceros horn.
Looping the hollows of swiss
her night-blind eyes rattle
with a butter-starch rasp.
A sigh rides the bus
like wrapping’s gloss,
It’s seeping out,
you’re nearly seen.
Velvet buds under the sheer scarf,
her ears pressed to the window,
podcasting new old supplements.
Deficient bones flake like stones,
feeling like a failure, pharmacy
deliver me from funk.
On the bottle’s unproven jacket
the hiker’s hair cascades.