21st century 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

I have discovered nothing

the_outsider

I have discovered nothing

no potent spasm in truth’s tinge
no certain depth in writhing divinity

I have no enlightenment

no broad scar laid on the slope of thought
no electrifying branch igniting the empty length

I have not discovered any principle

no sinking song hardening the stone
no plaited temple wall where war reclines exhausted

I have no message

no filament of yarn towards Ariadne’s love
no hidden sarcophagus where suffering lies embalmed

I have discovered no primeval essence

no visiting visage vanishing vastly
no substitute for this sum of smoke

Contemporary Poetry

carnivorous cosmology

carnivorous_cosmology

Don’t be shy
I’ve suckled that nipple
called sky

the universal figure of smoke,
whose body I call yours
and time’s standstill has been glimpsed
in the trunks of blood
that our tongues have enacted

what then is not an instant
but creation that will swell either
like an echo or a myth

don’t pretend like you
don’t understand
this carnivorous cosmology

don’t pretend like your
intelligence was flared and pure
and bubbling like open
lawns of lava

return to me tumultuous
and with gales amongst those
fluttering eyes
and and – and turn
your cold torso
towards the permanence of
the flare

don’t be shy
I’ve conquered without
logic the theory
of your lips

this is the only day left
for us —

to spill
like assassins
the bleeding cup
of night.

Contemporary Poetry

spiral measures

mote_of_sound

 

I am going to die.

But there are days
when flesh titillates
and joins the circus
of the sinews

and there’s ecstasy
in the flesh
as if it were loaves
of bread soaked
in froths of bliss

and the moment’s trapeze
is a vehicle or an aspect
of levitation

and neighbors witness
a whiff of shadow
swirling in dimly lit
orbit

and forget noon
dawn or wood
head or heart

being here
in physical perpetuity
in whirlpools of hairs
and hairs and hairs
and bones

veering
towards a dizzy
orchestration

until I become
a mote of sound

that has permeated
the intermediary air.

Contemporary Poetry

twigs of being

twigs_of_Being_poem

I would call it rain,
but it’s just a drop,
that slithers through
the contours of the
heartbeat.

I suddenly
become still,
like a branch
suddenly strapped
to a shaft of sunlight.

If I could peek
inside
to witness
a constellation of twigs,
flickering and shudders,
after each clinch,
as the hungry drop
tunnels through
the expanse of feeling.

At that moment,
language tangles up
into a yarn of illusion.

It falls still wet with joy.

I am planet
eroded by pleasure,
a hard knot of memory.

But everything is quiet,
only for a chime
every time
the drop clinks
against an organ
or a thought.

Contemporary Poetry

earthliness

earthliness_poem_pablo_Saborio

One drop
of
commonplace,
one drop
but completely
silent
within
empty engrossment.

A sole drip
of the mundane,
a trickle,
tingling
through
the minute
sense of being.

One gentle
course of earthliness,
a splash of it,
but soundless
echoing like
wings,
as a
boundless alleluia.

A speck
of prosaic,
a solitary
wandering
mote
concisely panoramic,
wordlessly grasped.

 

Contemporary Poetry

Per aspera ad astra

ad astra

 

I – waiting
in an unknown corner –
will have a shepherd’s role.
Heartlessly shall I pick up
an empty bucket and bang
it with drops of dew.
Flocks of words that have
broken skin will gather
around me like tiny shadows
of morning or soul.
If a window opens then
temples grateful with dust
from beginning to despair.
I will love the gaps in sound
when every word, world
after world, tightens into
a raceme and leaves its scent
plummet as – tar of transcendence,
foam of formlessness, empire of
impermanence, depth of delusion –
to the ground.
I intend, through endless pages
of misery and category,
to leave a trail for posterity
to meander through the truth
of resemblance in a metaphor.

Contemporary Poetry

Travel: Here, is the clamor.

sound_of_india

Here, is the clamor.
Totality crackling.
I gather every seed of noise
as grains of rice
inside my cupped hands.
A nomad hymn has travelled
as a fantastic bird
through an atmosphere of time.
Its reflection is a worn
anatomy of ripples:
moving slowly like a full
moon pulsating on a lake’s surface.
The song and the silence
have become animals
savagely wrestling for
a piece of creation. I’m
watching their pristine
movements from a land
where gods sit next to
man, woman and child;
where we all sit
rapt and perplexed
by the howl of the light
and the course of silence.
This is a land where even the gods
confess not knowing their origin;
much less the nest
from which the primal rhythm took flight.

Contemporary Poetry