21st century poetry

through artery

deeper_soul

To peek within,
through artery,
like spying through
a window into a room
with two armchairs
and a book of chemistry.

To capture within
the vaulted length,
the sinuosity of entrails
like a mountain range
that forces trees up toward the sky
with perched birds inside them
looking down toward the earth
for the head of a worm.

To glance within
through dilated ache,
while standing outside a café
in front of a mob that clothe
with invisible meaning
the earth and pretend its
burning bone will survive
the excitement of light
as crystal memory
in the pockets of their hearts.

To visualize within,
through hot telescope,
the distance of our truths,
like studying the clusters
of emptiness inside
an amoeba of hope.

To see within,
through the gate of the mouth,
a deeper hole that is glutted with silence,
like a threshold that opens up
not to soul
but to something even more
lost.

 

 

Contemporary Poetry

beer and smoke

beer_and_smoke

The carvings in the wood. Steps up, turn right, unzip, let it rip.

There is some necessity for being unconscious of the process.
Of the origin. Of the consequence and significance.
There is some necessity to intonate without ideal,
to fling actions all of the sudden
as dice without any odds of winning.

Fix hair. Zip, down the steps. Smoke fury of flurry. Beer; what’s the score?

The second, while being a vehicle of careless novelty, is actually
heavy, almost pregnant with the expression of expired millennia.
Seamless actions operate unconscious of the thrust of heavy history.

Running out of beer. Was it 25? Come one Jones, put it in the box!

Poetry is an exercise in distillation. An appropriation of the
universal, namely, to compress the universe into the right word.
It is mutiny against language, a futile revolution against excess.

For fuck’s sake, that’s it. What a poor effort. Let’s grab a bite.

There is nonetheless an element of arbitrariness in all postures.
The only sin is definition, that is to say, narrowing the flux
to one single image, fluid as this representation may be,
that will necessarily congeal the real nature of impermanence.

The clouds are suspended as the self. Return my symbol; I’m under the influence of the absolute.

This is not the language of the everyman. But the poetic is an
elevation of ordinary life, a dissection of the vital rhythms
that run through the flesh of form and the bone of force.

 

 

Contemporary Poetry

toward the soft constellation

soft constellation

I can tell you where I’m going, because I’ve been wrestling with remembrance toward the soft constellation and I scream in a loud abstraction: I aim beyond the tedium of destinations and I will tell you. Migrating like ink into the empty apartment, and the warmth of the sun sinks into my bloated pool of blood. The craftsmanship of carving windows onto the pale walls of silence. My voyage is a concentration of shadows amplifying the dominion of dust. The dialect is a purification of vision, to observe the structures that remain hidden behind the brightness of fear. This is where I’m going, dragging behind me the image of the ocean. Because I’ve lifted up the endless darkness that pulsated like an essence on the surface of the world. There is where I’m going, toward the equilibrium of the mirror, in a gigantic leap within.

Contemporary Poetry

when the cities collapse

lump_of_poetry

Set the feeling down. Like a stone
you brought from the outside
from a neglected garden.
Let’s be naked, gooseflesh
and fling your thoughts (true or delusive)
as your dirty lingerie, on the couch
I bought the other day, from a
man w/ a beard and jesus christ
what a beard he had.
Let’s lie down, like a century
like centuries do
in a stomp and muddled
like all centuries do.
But we don’t care about time,
only care for licked flesh, the skin
that philosophy grew around our muscles
and wrapped us in that idealism of matter.
Then we pluck desire as echoes from our eyes
and we’ll press against each other
like two enormous skies
up against the other
like two skies crushing a cloud.
And then we’ll stare at the walls, the floor,
the ceiling, we’ll say it’s paint, wood, concrete
and something beyond that, and something beyond
that and something or other beyond the last beyond.
But you’ll be asking questions, what about the fire,
the tomorrow, the singularity of human encounters
and the wounds of the galaxy. But I say, shut up
drop the politics and judge the day
as a lump of poetry merely.
After a while when the cities collapse
and you’re back with your heavy stones
crossing chasms and delving infinitudes,
remember what I said tonight, judge the day
merely as a lump of poetry.

Contemporary Poetry

the act

the_act

A common blink. The human
act. It’s 3.50 am and I am
a swirl of smoke with swing
in the bar but no cigarette.
I dance alone, snapping
fingers, closing eyes
fun against the circumference.
I drop a sigh and it tumbles
down the ankles and hits
the bubbles of the dirty
dance floor. I think,
I’ve been once
a fetus. An ounce.
A particle of blood.
Now, I blink and participate
in the trigonometry
of the complex. The act.
This is a vein of music.
I dangle and dance.
Brushing against the
solitary totality.
I’m blinking without a
cigarette. Squashing
the disease of saliva,
the last residue below
my feet.
Singling out the lonesome
route of the human
noise. Arms casually
spiraling toward the touch
of fat air. The fat noise.
I blink and light
is splattered onto conscious.
I dance. 3. 59 am and I barely am.

 

 

Contemporary Poetry

A rose above fury toward sea

copper_sea

A rose above fury toward sea
life holy hole
I here stretch the song
of earthly length
to dwell in portrait and silk,
bushes of fire
decorate the string of minutes
like quick summits expiring
everywhere, every orient
framed in the dark charcoal
that is art of the dream,
a sky beneath violence toward star
death anchored across
thin perfumes of morning and love,
I hear strange technologies
building a mad edge,
in fog twine comets and flora
coexisting with the habits
of our blood, everywhere
every white memory
finding a violet conflagration,
to sleep united with some knot of
violin in the tremors
of the sudden heart;
that rose fuming with essence toward a copper sea.

Contemporary Poetry

the care of the self

care_of_self

When I awoke today
I looked at my exhausted limbs
and there – THERE was a wave of tremendum
shafts of wild fascination
hanging from every bit of skin
as by whim, as by holy pendulum
I’d like to judge and proclaim
the final voice is nothing but noise
I rage.
I remain.
Hidden in a territory that history does not interrupt.
A soft sinuous sense like solitude or silencing.
Oh man, how’ve danced and surrendered,
circling the city as a mote swerving around the shafts
of light in this barren room. Alive and extensions
of some unknown cause. Fluttering like a scream
in the barbarity of ignorance. I am proud, a huge
pound of ignorance. A huge pyramid of bliss.
I was a dream. A mirrored mirage.
But now, full of fascinatum
I have the holy stream of eternity
wasted as a shadow
below my feet.
I’ve spilled the moonshine over my bare breasts
in the agony of madness.

Contemporary Poetry

simulacra

city_Existence

I have never tasted the world.

With skin, I cannot live as a man

in a city simulation.

Before it rains the landscape

sober despite action.

I did not walk across

the surface of awareness

. Pure angst that it is.

Imagine happiness like held thunder.

When something is new

its artificial language displaces the

characteristics of the innovation.

But I’ve prayed for the earth

to dissolve as a drug on

my tongue. And extend

a bridge between truth

and this movement.

The blood stands in the way

like a mural of total redness.

 
I’ve never tasted the world.
With this skin that can only mirror susurrations.

 

Contemporary Poetry

Against finality

savage_offspring

 

There must be beasts
that crawl like moons
behind the city buildings

I stare at their fumes
that spiral toward solitude
and the streets like swollen
veins struggling against
the violence of light

I have not spied them enough
nor have I done fair scholarship
to deduce their silences

I am more of a theologian
deducing with furious axioms
their temptation to laugh
and recording the syllogism
of wings that chisel
the silk of decay

they are beasts of atmosphere
and dawn and the noise of eclipses
and in one ambitious hallucination
we coexist with their rosy disasters

who are they, the monsters
these vehicles of modern destiny?

I cannot answer.
There is no final system.
The roads are covered with
the round tears of the desert.

The news has not reached paradise.
we are here to stay – on earth, at noon –
with our blue and sentimental beasts;
whatever savage offspring of our dreams.

 

 

Contemporary Poetry

towards a quiet curve

language_of_clouds

The first day the mechanism
was hard to endure
as kissing one’s objectives goodbye.
Really, you’re lost and sick with ennui.
If years are all that’s left, better die
in a second. Ever after, total laugh,
in a blot of obscurity, forever,
without ever understanding or
being understood or caring whether
life was worth it, because once you die,
your theory of the universe, the entirety
of what was known returns to a pool
of nondescript silence. Rejoice, the only witness
to absurdity is dead. Soon, in a flash and no one
can change that. No god, no medicine, no spirituality,
no delusion. Postponement, yes. But death and its
miracle is near. Don’t grieve, rejoice, like hot flames
atop a mirror looking down at their fleeting brilliance;
rejoice as the sailor – which is everyone –in a fever
crossing the sea of life, singing with a sigh
in the language of the clouds.

Contemporary Poetry