contemporary poems

first time

21st_century_poem

 

Remember the beginning
when even purity was a hot coal
in our hands.
The waves of genesis
and we built a clock, a molecule at a time.
We followed the river and
craved of its skin like white fur and foam
to be annihilated as beams and ripples in the sea.
Society was a coffin where we learned a dialogue of echoes.
But now this ear of mine hears the throat of time gutter
so timeless motion of reiteration
its old blossoms of fine appearance.
Now the distance is glazed with my breath.
The elements are trapped in the hard wombs of words
but everything else crumbles as shadows being
faceless in the ash.
Memory, remember when memory was a fruit we had only
tasted once?
I’m frightened because the sky is immense
and I am naked in its clouds
like a prostitute in the
wind.

 

 

Contemporary Poetry

how to write a poem

contemporary_poet

The trick is to close the eyes.
To look for the thing
crawling below the carpet of darkness of the lids.
Remain still like a hunter. Do not stir
even if a sliver of light echoes through the emptiness.
You’re looking for a boom.
It starts with a swirl of symbols
curling around each other
in wild experiments of mutation.
You’re looking for a spark, an isolated
hazardous word that will scale
up the fence of perception, to consume
the whole plantation of thoughts.
Venture into this plague of accidents,
advance as a whirlwind upon the dunes of ash.
Soon the darkness begins to burn bright,
you are a sun leaping into a single atom
witnessing a birth to the naked eye.

 

Contemporary Poetry

mortal questions

mortal_questions

Who chases the myth
while drenched
in the blood
of the primordial hunt?

Who has placed a hyphen
between Sky and I
to sense the aura
of a blue atmosphere
as a newer skin?

Who will concentrate
all language
into one singular word
that falls heavy
             as a meteorite
into the sands
of nocturnal desert?

Who will endlessly
double the depth
of one earth suspended
in the night?

Who will reduce
consciousness
to a milligram
of image?

Who has made
a door from odor
through which memory
walks out
into open land?

Who will unearth
mankind and root
childhood back
in the curl
    of a cloud?

Who will find
this poem hidden
from the glare of knowledge
waiting in the shadows
of their touch?

Contemporary Poetry

A man walks into the store

pack_of_smokes

A man walks into the store and buys a pack of smokes.
You see him leave and get into his car. Drives home and smokes one.

You’ll never see the man ever again. That’s how it goes.

But the next day you realize;

He was a man that once had a cat.

He had a theory about the universe,

and a tear that sat like an effigy
in the cubicle of his sad brown eye.

Contemporary Poetry

one hundred twenty-one words

abyss_above_us

Yesterday there,
could have written
a poem, a tunnel
to something greater
than what we amassed
in many units
of cyclic century

I could have, yesterday.
Created a segment of fiction
that borrows truth as tool
and made universe
a cog in a bigger dream

Yesterday, there
was only need for one hundred
twenty-one words
to serve as ligament
between the earth
and a single
human heart

I could have, yesterday.
Covered my eyes, my eyes
with pungent dust and
swallowed the interior
of a cloud. Something vague
but elementary, could have
been spoken

Yesterday there,
could have left legacy
to some mad prophecy,
I could have dropped
an ounce of voice
into the hole
that is an abyss
above us.

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

behold the word

basis_of_Earth

 

 

A poet holds a word
like a heavy tragedy.
A poet holds a word
like a loud apocalypse.
A poet holds a word
like an epic miniature.
A poet holds a word
like a historic voyage.
A poet holds a word
like the cup of disease.
A poet holds a word
like the blood’s island.
A poet holds a word
like the axis of light.
A poet holds a word
like the noise of truth.
A poet holds a word
like an immense event.
A poet holds a word
like a vital bone.
A poet holds a word
like the spine of god.
A poet holds a word
like eternity’s tear.
A poet holds a word
like the basis of the earth.

 

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

existence as fiction

existence_as_fiction

Our existence is an exercise in fiction.
And it’s through a perversion of this art
that fiction becomes simulation of reality,
thus problematic.

The task is to comprehend
the problem without attempting
to provide a solution for it.

The greatest actors convey
an understanding of the problem
and are applauded as heroic
because they continue thriving
in contradiction with the unsolvable
(fictitiously real) problem.

This is theater of the mind
and valiant acts have been written
with the futility of blood.

The tragic hero’s only
certainty is his ineffective success
and our only consolation is his
acceptance of suffering.

This is our pathos.
The tragic man makes the problem
his only audience.

He must feign suffering until its pain
becomes as real as the simulation of the problem.

He then says that the salvation is unattainable,
that freedom is nothing more than
the purest state of fiction.

And in the irony of his language, he’s dead right.

 

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