Half-full of someone like a mother or her lover unbuttoned in dad’s traveling robe, turned around in an instant, to the strained grace of pointed cameras. A kleptomaniac of attention, eyes pinched in to lit aluminum, hoarding the latest loss of memory in a cipher nation of nervous oblivion, entertaining what remains of the children. [...]
A man with a backbone is dangerously exposed. This explains a shortage.
I can divine these brambles. Or these gnarled flowers at my feet. They obscure my heels as I float on yellow horizons. Tip the diagonal of my arms into the numbers of years set down like dust. I can, you see, lead you somewhere, over rock and highland green. I can conjure stone from earth [...]
Tagged poetrythe reverberation of the garage door opening tickles me from below, i can’t wait for you to come back up after your morning smoke. i miss your warm breath against my shoulders, your arms around me, the tip of your toes protruding from the blanket’s warmth on an anonymous wisconsin morning – is it sunny, [...]
In these godless days of the year 2009, of which a quarter has already been gnawed away by the dredging samsara of day to day, week to week workhorse life…
High Windows When I see a couple of kids And guess he’s fucking her and she’s Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives– Bonds and gestures pushed to one side Like an outdated combine harvester, And everyone young going down the long slide [...]
Tagged featured writers, poetryOh didn’t we dance a puzzle Round the tree when we Danced the way we did In early April when all is Vernal and we needed twigs to Invoke the gods that hovered Near a healthy sprig About a foot or so longer Than needed to produce an Invocation that requires wood Or a cross [...]
Tagged poetry, Scott ZieherOnce upon a time there was an error So ridiculous so minute No one could have paid attention to it It couldn’t stand To see or hear itself It made up all sorts of nonsense Just to prove That it really didn’t exist It imagined a space To fit all its proofs in And time [...]
Tagged Proud Error, Vasko PopaLife, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother told me as a boy (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored means you have no Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am [...]
Tagged John Berryman, poetryUp in the pent apartment, scarcely a story away from an incidental street, flush from another neighborhood murder, at odds, again, with the alleged moon. Hungry, but out of essential soup, so walking the way of all flesh to the quick mart for coffee and reports in Arabic. A targeted buyer of bottles and noodles [...]
Tagged joesmithfrom The Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems 1969-1999 – BUY THE BOOK . LEDGELIFE The taller the monument, the more impatient our luggage. Look, look, a graveyard has fancy dirt. Historians agree: this is the pebble which beaned Goliath. Every billboard is theoretically as beautiful as what lies unseen behind [...]
Tagged Bill Knott. CHRISTMAS AT THE ORPHANAGE But if they’d give us toys and twice the stuff most parents splurge on the average kid, orphans, I submit, need more than enough; in fact, stacks wrapped with our names nearly hid the tree: these sparkling allotments yearly guaranteed a lack of–what?–family?– I knew exactly what it was I [...]
Tagged Bill KnottFEEDING THE SUN One day we notice that the sun needs feeding. Immediately a crash program begins: we fill rockets with wheat, smoke-rings, razorblades, then, after long aiming –they’re off. Hulls specially alloyed so as not to melt before the stuff gets delivered we pour cattle rivers windmills, aborigines etcet into the sun which however, [...]
Tagged Bill Knott