The Way of the Poem
"I who bend
torn apart over the sheets of paper
eyes aslant hallucinating under your skirt"
-Alfredo de Palchi
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non states
anti events
holes in the language where I work
at the core
of it
ideas of sleep, beauty, flesh
human strangeness
a vast text inescapable
shit and death
where the poem eats itself
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Evening's dark wings close quickly.
Dogheaded people begin roaming.
Cold wind blows the asters down.
The owl-woman in the trees
No longer answers my call.
I breathe on glass to write.
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Grey day green tea lunch hours
Pass as always
Life's gone
Impossibility of poems
Look at that cat running
across the sky
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I shed pure gold tears
For every star that quivers
For every skirt in the wind
Dark wine cools the brain
Hermit ways deepen
I leave poems to the poets
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The sky is out.
Stars shimmer like silver leaves.
Vigils of ink
In this fragile rift,
Every corner engulphed
In final afternoons.
An almost human voice
Rises from the dust.
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A girl floats by
Wind and light
Grass and pear
Motes and words
Drunk tonight
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Every moment is a struggle
Toward the unknown image.
In another time,
On another world,
I would have given you my life.
Bewildered and stupified,
I wring out my drooling cloth
All over my doggerel filled notebooks.
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The bridges are made of paper and shadow
That pass over
The runs of trees, suns and lifetimes.
The world goes by, I'm not in it.
Half a hand scratches broken phrases
Amidst these hills and days.
Dead skies, coffee steam, dark leaves
Remain.
Grasses turn pink in a cold rain.
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Green sleep pink chiffon
Only Sundays truly exist like suicide poems
Rain and hangovers when the words won't work
0 lift your skirt I'll just look
And be on my way
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The streets run straight up,
Rainsoaked and pigeont^eaded,
Echoing with wet faces.
Oracles tell of owl-less trees,
Flesh-less years.
Gagging on clouds and phrases,
I look npw only to the light of these words
Scraped clean
To the beautiful music of bones.
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cold empty morning pages
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Unpaged
World after world trashed
Blanker every day
Poems women birds erased
Where the trees were
The light
Cries and cries
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An old man waking confused
Thirsty for poems and
All the young flesh of the world
Images remain but fading
Still too many words
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Poems dart and thrust
Among stars among fireflies
My hands among the syllables
A long thigh at noon
Sets me dreaming
Death and drunkenness and endless snow
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Moonburnt pages curling as I write
The dresses the whiteness
The moving underneath
To see what makes
The poem work
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Around the rooftops at night
The secret language of the deepest mind
Her cooing on the surface of the world
The traffic passes in a dream
I am erased to this wakening
A slow wind blowing
The flutter of pages
That's all of it
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Horsechestnuts split open in the night.
I dream of pink figs, green rain.
While I sleep, stars die,
Girls everywhere slide off their panties.
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Doves are silent.
Combs of light drip impossible
Promises.
The day breaks itself,
I see orange flashes,
Hair, Fire, Mars,
I fall into the vast moments
And all the lines are cut
Into streets and I cannot finish.
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I dream of meeting a librarian
Who catalogs only moods and whispers,
And who tastes of rain and cinnamon
Though the wind seems filled with salt and eucalyptus.
I turn homeward,
Thinking of the great Tome of Dust
I am writing, for nothing and for no one.
The yards are memories in a dream,
My head sucks in all the ghostyears at once.
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Frozen leaf pile,
Pond mud,
Seckle pears,
Wild onions:
These smells from childhood
Have me staggering drunkenly through my origins,
Looking for a vixen
To fuck me to death.
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A million poems roar in my ears.
All the days are crusht into one.
Skirts fly away from me
Like empty pages,
The moon burns up
Porches and dark windows.
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Sick with language.
Autumn rains, other fleshes.
Glories of the blank page:
Rasberry and gold,
Musicbox voices,
Ballerinas and waxwings.
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I wander Saturday's abyss of pulp
and cinders,
dreaming of buttocks drenched in light.
In the stark hard hills
a sorceress and a basilisk await,
with eyes of opal,
amethyst feathers
and a nest of bright cinnamon.
I keep walking
through a rain of diamonds,
looking
for magic poems to read.
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In the far reaches of the night,
The great lamps of the trees
Burn and burn
The years away.
Starry-eyed with ink and suicide,
This impasse of words
Leaves no choice.
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In bed on long rainy Sundays
Drenched in rose and silver
Coffee and pine
All suns burning out
No hair
No thighs
A face of dust on the window
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On the streets to work
I see the reamins of human nights.
The quivering of a silver flesh,
A mind of roses with immortal lips,
A shadow burned onto the river
And a cloak of moss
Fallen into the cold nest of years
Where I pass from blank to blank
In the ghostcolored mornings.
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Feasting is done now.
In the greyfeathered evenings
A million lights.
An eerie beauty haunts.
Echo within echo.
The word undress.
Salt,the stars,
I vomit galaxies of dust.
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Roses and women and books;
Clouds and lamps and suicide.
Behind autumn curtains
I lurk and brood.
The morning is a cold wine,
I fall asleep
And dream of golden dragonflies.
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Bejewelled hermits pass
Among you
In this bitterness of light,
Casting spells in rotting kitchens.
What's left,
These scarlet skies turning deep orange,
On this dying morning,
A velvet caress of moons and winds.
Word-mucus like TB and dried roses
And the dust of a million books,
A liqueur made from the tremor of stars,
Poems written hungover
And shitting in the dark.
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Scraps of moon,
Lipstick smear,
Eyes teeth skin all mixed,
The face of the strange.
Not poetry
But the cold hard core of the poem.
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Sundays drenched in sleep.
I ride a ship of birds to distant rooms
Of ivory and afternoon.
Words burn out as I write them,
Like flares of ink between breasts.
Music, angels, stars, lamps.
Dark breathings of the trees at night.
I drown in the hair of ghosts.
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These years unwriteable unfuckable
Where her breasts were
Where the moon was
It's like words or something
I just stare and stare
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I burn up wine and clouds,
Cicada wings, songs of mist
And girls with thighs of ice.
I throw away poem after poem,
All of them useless
Before the living cunt of death.
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I live in this dust
All words unknown now
Then what
The then
The what
Coffee rain eternity