Agendas

It was never about the invention and the potential

Lives it would save,

It was about who would be written into History as the Hero.

Humphry Davey tried to hide his poetry but stole the lamp.

All for naught, while I sat in the reader's circle, stitching

around Cat’s Cradle-the Dissertation,

and  getting into mining

text instead of ice-nine, we found something like 

fire-ten

and it is spreading.

They were all over the place, Vietnam, Silicon Valley,

East and west coasts, away from the story 

and as Vonnegut said,

Disappearing up its own-

Never-mine-

The kids are still mining for cobalt in the Congo.

No, no, no better. In any language

even with repetition. When does practice make

better-off schadenfreude

Karma is driven toward the one who hit my car 

and drove away.

The grandma laughs at the puke from her grandson.

That makes her son puke too,

and she gets her just desserts 

in between the seats.

We both like the smell of horse manure. 

Italo is easily distracted at first, every day, I should stop 

feeling “death hath undone so many”*.

“In headaches and in worry, 

Vaguely life leaks away

And Time will have his fancy

To-morrow or to-day”**, as Auden would say.

Of course, the dryer refused to spin,

the bills keep pouring in, and there are two-thousand

nine-hundred synonyms for drunk, but sober I remain

loaded on the sole adjective, waiting on the verb

of Time. 

Meanwhile, inspiration is found in flying buttresses, 

among the changing sky, ribbed vaults and pointed arches 

that withstood thirty percent more stress.

Oh yes, it was time again

to act as if one never knows

how things come together.

*T.S. Eliot and **W.H. Auden

Painting by Frank Dobson, 1944 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Sans compunction

No point. No point at the end.

How do you know you are there-

Where?

At the end, I don’t.

(In)³-8

And is it Close or Close? Close.

As meta for unraveling also ravels.

Breathe. I forgot what inspired me.

If used, it still possesses zero dimensions:

Does it matter if there

Or here, or Not? I appreciate the white

                                               Space(s) left by you...

As in, moving targets that spin

seem still, hazy-but fuzzy was her favorite.

How do you know when it is done,

Or the piece is a settled preposition?

Just to suppose, juxtapose those positions,

what if feathers deny making a Pound

is the Emperor Penguin still Dressed (Up)?

They were all thought experiments. I thought they were poems.

A poet cannot leave re-normalization-alone.

I came pre-traumatized, I sat subserviently

and listened for the equi-valence on this side,

punctuated by give and take.

The man said most don't know. As a physicist, he fishes.

His curiosity overflowing banks and boxed cats

and asks the layman to believe in nothing proven safe for consumption.

The stomach still drops in

conceptual elevators

labeled Science and Art

                                   "Going Down"

                                    (rabbit holes).

This poem was composed of notes I took while at an event hosted by the Arthur C. Clark Center for Imagination featuring Rae Armantrout and her condensed chapbook titled "Entanglements" (pub.d by Wesleyan) on April 13th, 2017 (also her birthday). 

chiaroscuro in chalk

The thinnest limn of luna
fights her way through forests
of shadowed beings

Dimly disappearing cusp,
the darkness drinks its last sips
of amber

Spheres spinning so fast none saw
the movement, as vertigo, camouflage
in dancing shadows, the coins spin

The same two choices,
flashing rims and eye lids
make vertigo

Below bodies levitate between
the same two choices
quintessence finds the balance

between particle and wave,
reflecting accord on a fulcrum
or where to draw the line

between light and dark spaces.








Artwork by John Bauer [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Fruit bearing

When you peal back all the exterior layers that have built up
around the original seed
of conflict-which stems not from the picking of,
nor the eating of the lowest hanging fruit
or thereby sharing its ripe pungent juices
with another needing nourishment-
generosity doubles its pleasures
and we are both guilty-expelled-and angry at
the circumstance.

The great divergence actually occurred
when it was Found.
Of course, she saw it first, so she is the gatherer,
but inevitably, it is his Discovery.

Her gaze may have given it away,
yet, let it be known, consumption was never her goal,
it was a thirst she learned to live with
his hunger scared the birds.

With his long arm, and extensive reach,
He provided
for himself
bittersweet meats, her nectar, her basket,
the load she carried, the bodies he dragged,
the plates she cleaned, the fires he stoked

he becomes sated with his accomplishments,
being the first to find,
everything a man could ever need or want
and will defend his property
to the end-

He cocks his sharp weapon,
its poison dipped tip enough to take a life
hostage, something stirs, scares him, he aims
while she is busy gathering her bearings and things,
biting her lip and drinking the blood

They divided the chores
between conquer and conquest, bleeding and bled
out.
She seeks
comfort, security,
he finds
himself lost without her
basket.




Painting by Emmanuel Benner the Younger, 'Hunters in wait' 1879 in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

A Gentle Hand

Not speaking for other species,
a human being shall not deny
the power of touch, tact-tility.
As in a word, requires the
relinquishing of an invasion of space
for a sense of felicity, in kind

where seeming accidental, more so
gently, intentional, affixed upon
shoulder or thigh, put so adverbial or
propositional, it is
in earnest, rightly so,
it feels heavier than
the application of pressure
or happenstance.

This need to reach out
and grasp toward
this living moment,
or clutch the vibration
that is life, date-stamped
within our fleshy fingertips.
It is compulsatory

that we soon become
etched or embossed with entitlement,
as in adept for survival and
toward those celebrating this.
It was a touching thing it was said,
to feel mankind
using his hands wisely, for once
in this way.





Painting by John William Godward [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Ellipsis

.

The point was never to be asked

as to why or where

for it was only an aim

as if trying may turn

chance into favor.

..

We looked together

at the same art on the same page,

seeing two very different

images

before us in this self-portrait and

agreed only how much it resembled 

us, individually. 

...

Another reason to dig deeper

and to not avoid the back-breaking 

work or big fear,

is discovering 

that the work worked perfectly

for making castles with dirt

or other temporary shelters for our

homeliness. 

Painting by Colin Campbell Cooper, 1921 in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Quicksand in the hourglass

Turned overnight into the shadow,
an ominous space easily overlooked-

devoid of light in this dire dilemma
of grasping at grains, starlit seeds of time,

accepting these days that display
traces of altered spin-
and small places
for sin.

Take out the woven-store the sheer.
Year after year, resort
the bookshelves
by ilk
and most pointed dagger,

Titles,
those names mean nothing
-Placeholders-
arm your selves
about the fire and ice, in these
extremities, inside and isolated,
the glass steams up,
the walls smolder around the skins,

and the colder they get,
the deeper they sink
into the thickest of thoughts.

Tucked in this virtuous blackness,
the rest had no peace,

and the sand moved slowly
towards what could only be hours.



Painting by Sebastiano Ricci, c. 1706 in [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.