nihilistic 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

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

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

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

Pose for me

body_despair_sketch

 

Take off your clothes.
Peel off every last layer.
Squat, further down.
Place your left arm over your left knee. There.
Bend your upper body to the right. Just there.
Right foot a tad over to the right. Lean forward
the other arm straight down touching
the coldness of the earth. Don’t look
at me, look down as if something
great and heavy was pushing you down
restraining your mobility, locking you
with the awkward chain of the body itself.
Untighten your abdomen. Relax the brow,
look defiant as if you’ve been angry
for years, but tired and nearing hopelessness,
like an irrational animal that’s exhausted
from growling in its cage.
There, let your member hang. Let the
pain of the bones and joints led
to convulsions, feel the crush and the pendulum.
Begin to accept this position as your end,
as your skin’s predestination.
There, that’s it. It will be over soon.
I almost got it.

It will be over …. soon.

 

Contemporary Poetry

a minute’s peace

minute_of_peace

when 3:13
it was foggy
and too careless
to measure the vastness of solitude

when 3:15
a slither of divine ache
clashed against a clump
of earth
probably though
it was against my
awfully wakeful heart.

when 3:17
my extended hand
kneads the air
and the eyes slough
a peel of memory
towards a new gloriousness

when 3:29
I show my membership card
staff smiles. They know me.
I ask: what’s the time?
3:29, they say.

3: 38
the southernmost minute’s gone

3:39
without consenting to our isolated reasons

when 3:43
I begin reading:

Religion is the last subject that the intellect beings to understand. In our youth we may have resented, with proud superiority, its cherished incredibilities; in our less confident years we marvel at its prosperous survival in a secular and scientific age, its patient resurrections after whatever deadly blows by Epicurus, or Lucretius, or Lucian, or Machiavelli, or Hume, or Voltaire. What are the secrets of this resilience?

when 3:45
I don’t want to smear eternity
with another coat of futility

when 3:59
got up comically
confusedly
coquettishly
can’t wait for spring to come

when 4:01
outside again
ready to concoct
some opaque purpose.

when 4:05
with a beer
throwing away the wreaths
of opinion that cling to my hair.

when 4:26
murmuring:
everyman’s angelic grave

4:26
surrender the surrounding suffering

4:27
for a sparse minute of peace.

 

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

paradise raw

Leigh_Ledare_Charlottenborg_copenhagen

I dreamt last night that god had reincarnated into a stone.
How it happened is hard to explain
but it was in the US, of all places!
Then I started scratching off the light.
There was nothing left except the immoral space of neutrality
and I began to move amongst cocks
and paradise raw.
I began writing a poem, in the dream
every last stanza
rhyming with the word

thaw

I hardly ever rhyme my verse.
It was strange.
That god would have chosen
the US, of all places.

But I can’t seem to let it go.
The poem, with 4 or 5 stanzas.
Alliteration aligned cosmically.
Even with shadows circling
a verb. I woke up at noon, processing
the real. Honestly, I did not want to wake
up chained to daylight.

But now I’m at
Leigh Ledare’s exhibition
trying to recall
what kind of poem could I
have written amongst cocks
and paradise raw.

 

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