absent magazine

Season 2 Episode 7

We weren’t going to leave home. But made bold
somehow by the rain we put our best foot forward.
-John Ashbery

We the bleached, we the gilded, we the god awful, we the thieves

have clamored this beach like so many squirrels and hid our trustees.

 

This production we anticipate

like the sun
&

the spore
&

 

the skunks of our former existences

skulking from our dawn-walked dogs.

 

We water-board our aspirations

because the immediate is shoddy

 

& we can’t decide what fits the definition of law

from these made-up choices of magic & monomyth

 

it seems apparent the future went wrong.

 

Someone hung a flag here once. Where its silk would flap in a breeze

is a canary disturbance. A filed report.

 

Somewhere someone is looking lovely inside a dress.

 

There are horses in the throat of our becoming & they

are on fire. I and I are in the same captivity narrative.

 

Abstractly we are entombed by our own piles

of maladaptive dander. It is an empty chest

 

we present to the master, full of love & luck & prosperity

& other empties. Perhaps that is poetry as a shipwreck could be -

 

Perhaps I need a device.
OR

I need a process.
OR

 

This is a poem

where our extremes meet on the street

 

& the words & gestures around arousal are themselves aroused.

We balked at the futility, didn’t we? I in my kerchief & you in your cap.

 

No, those were houses on fire & they belong

now & forever to that same fire.

Season 1 Episode 22

In the teeth of the wind I became the straight arrow
poised among a brethren of arrow released

into simultaneous flight -
I couldn’t garner or repeat for you

on a page as it were, the static autobiographical
between our ears, our shanks, rushing headlong

toward the thunder & the flaw of the throbbing
bulls eye polished to the texture of rescue.

Something in the mechanical garden buzzed.
Who didn’t feel themselves to be in very tight shoes?

The numbers we heard were the crouching cadence
of worm waiting for their replacements to arrive.

On the brink of what would be routine
was on the brink of what would be tradition,

it was dark territory, a bad luck hotel
that chose you or rejected you

by the way the locks worked or stopped working
the way they were expected to,

unintuitive to many and foretold by one.
And then I was in the purpose of this.

And then I was in the purpose of this.
The name of this, invisible as a buzz is

Nobody has become his name
and then I was in the purpose of this story

as it stands now; long, murky, & incomplete.
Yet there is no territory left in our seen environment

we feel we cannot know & we are wrong.
Same way you open your eyes to see your family

clung to the outer yowl of a sink hole
& recalling that it claimed them all

there is a blade of grass in your pant cuff that vibrates,
a dedicated dog that pants -

following the trailblazer at a day’s length, a blot
daubing red paste on the trunks of palms

while dragging the luggage of fathers long dead
we are each of the two folding leaves of a theory

united by a hinge and the other side is blank.
In his pocket, a collection of draughtmen

he’s yet to place, in the cuff of my pant
a blade of grass that vibrates.

In the act of being, we think of survival perhaps
but being all the while in that sweat

causes a droop in our flight -
all the books by Dickens never read.

Like the spider who was my friend
until he spun a web that mimicked ganglia

& I tore him from this statement, there is a violence,
a seething that grows thirsty step by step.

What was unsaid but writ on every spore
that bilked our shoddy lungs of commonwealth

was an obvious transmission we missed by a hair -
the one that guaranteed return after the credits

unrolled & the summer thickened
acting out a mystery without a script.

Until grammar, greased & knitted through
with possibilities of heroism collapses

& words become their spring-like selves
this my dear viewer, may never be done.