postmodern 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

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

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

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

metapoetics: a simple song of sand

song_of_sand

I have a minute to sing,
that is to say,
to open the mouth and exhale sound,
or, one could say, to release
a melody-scented breeze,
perhaps even,
while stretching its meaning,
one could say,
to extract from the lungs
a billow of rhythm,
or even more wildly poematic,
to secrete from the lips
a blossom of chords,
which can also be put,
if one indulges in poetic flights,
as,
radiating threads of harmony
from the oval aperture.

And I’ll sing of the sand,
that is to say,
of the minuscule shining cells,
or, one could say, of the worn
establishment of rocks,
perhaps even,
while stretching its meaning,
once could say,
of Blake’s innumerable worlds,
or even more wildly poematic,
of time’s corrugated vestige,
which can also be put,
if one indulges in poetic flights,
as,
soft volumes of exhausted earth.

But I only have a minute to sing, so I sing a simple song of sand.

Contemporary Poetry