We fight but sometimes we forget
what we don’t know we love. And yet
I still like it. I like the way
we fight, but sometimes we forget
this is a game. I like to play.
I still like it. I like the way
the world unfolds itself at night.
Saxa atque solitudines voci respondent
Still, all we wanted was some inspiration,
and so we tuned our ears to the unknown.
We heard the one about the heart of stone,
and so we all set out to fashion one.
At heart, the change remains just what it seems.
You reinvent the secrets that you keep,
you recognize disguises, you enclose
the call inside the answer. Don’t suppose
that just because we always looked asleep,
the answers came to us as if in dreams.
We found that we were sprouting mossy wings.
We slumbered darkly, rocked by noises,
until we woke up to the sound of voices
lisping the truest sense of holy things.
Bestiae saepe immanes cantu flectuntur atque consistent
We found the things our stillness recommends,
some holy ground, a stash of songs, some new
sets of teeth that charm as sure as they cut,
new loves that wink and promise to be true
and whisper oh it doesn’t matter what
you do I’ll love you anyway, new friends,
false selves that trim the fat from fight or flight,
false faces, the ability to lie,
a new proclivity to meet the eye
of what we want to eat, a muscle curled
and crouched and looking backwards at the night,
a wicked shift that we still strain to feel,
new arsenals that could unmake the world:
the things we need to make the world real.
Allen and Greenough’s New Latin Grammar
Certain moods are required as a sign of subordination.
These methods make darling a distinction
between purpose and result,
pending the exalting so or so much.
Fostering confusion between causal and concessive
easily slips into matters of time,
time when, or maybe with.
Maybe—what is relative usually isn’t indicative.
Sometimes the truest way of things
is best expressed by a past contrary to fact—
the curse of chaos barely shuffled off
by the blessing of what didn’t happen to happen.
Likewise,
we less superstitious assent to utopian literature—
a future more vivid,
tricks of timetravel, tomorrows and tropes.
Doomed little things—
a beautiful excuse for the use of lest,
for the charm of this mad king’s dream,
a language full of invisible subjects.
Or like Macbeth we find
things no sooner uttered
than delivered,
then—
nothing is but what is not, or
nothing is but what is said.
Just try it.
Just try to just say nothing.
These are the words of bestial dispositions,
a screwing of sound,
a court masquing for our panting,
the libertine’s love of letters, of reported speech.
Begin the staged exorcism of the volitional,
let the gilded butterflies laugh back,
let the speech all be an act—
this is how to do things with words.
Meanwhile, somewhere in ancient Rome,
it trembles for its antecedent.
Little does it know what the world becomes—
dreams after dreams, endless dependent clauses.
Fortunately, the partitive genitive
keeps the show going,
a part of the whole
with the whole of a thing—
synecdoche, a wet dream
of the truly infinitive,
which by definition
cannot be modified.
Here—hic, in haec re, in hoc—
this is where the story might end.
The old stories don’t get along
with the new grammar.
Once upon a time,
when one thing led to another,
you wouldn’t write about your death
in perfect tense.
Nowadays, the thing you take in becomes
everything.
Everything comes home with us
to be played and replayed.
Like taking home a Christmas tree
and waking up deep in the forest,
like the end beginning,
like a dead man poised to make a poem,
this is the conceit of the complementary infinitive.
The Christmas Tree takes us from to be to praise—
brought down at last,
it couldn’t be any other way.
Tania Brown
On Weeknights
On weeknights, she
painstakingly applies lipstick, a
paint-the-numbers exercise where she
does her best to
stay in the lines and
not stain her teeth with
tell-tale red; she
steadies her hand as
the mascara wand,
a fairy godmother in a tube,
plumps and
makes appear
what wasn’t there before.
She squeezes her feet into heels and
wobbles like a bell
chiming the appropriate hour in
her knee length skirt.
“Let’s go for a walk,”
she tells the dog, who
plays his part well by
always being ready at the door.
She strolls down the street,
summoning her best impersonation of
someone put together,
not falling apart
at the seams.
On weekends, she
stays home in his old clothes, her
knees peeking through
holes worn by time, and
watches movies,
lips whispering lines that
remind her of him, as
the dog waits for
another weeknight.
Slice of Life
Frozen:
a slice of life extracted,
permafrost edging in,
tainting the feigned perfection
of a memory
carefully preserved in microscopic detail
to show what he wanted
and not what was.
Burn Me Clean
I poke at the bloody hole,
ragged edges stinging,
feel around the space where you were—
the way you filled me up and
still left me wanting,
the way you ripped me open so
I could never be whole again.
It’s funny now—
in that soul-crushing way which is
never actually funny but
we say “funny” because
who really wants to think about
the pain we’re obscuring—
funny how
you were a security blanket, a
safe haven for my worried heart,
for my mind that never stopped
firing on all cylinders,
until it did, and
now it just fires on one:
you.
Funny how you were,
then in one decisive moment,
you decided you weren’t, and
who was I to say that
you’d gotten it wrong?
That you’d always be,
eve
n when you were no longer.
You were
your favorite shirt,
the one I’ll never return,
because dammit,
it looks good on me, and
every time I wear it
I catch that sweet scent and
my head is filled with you,
buttoned up in the softest flannel as
you lift another box
higher than I can reach,
always willing to do those little things that
made my life easier,
until you weren’t.
I’m not sure how so much of you
fit in that hole,
how I packed away
even the tiniest pieces—
your smirk, the crinkle of your eye,
your general nonchalance,
your affinity towards devil’s advocacy—but
unpacking it has been even harder.
I light the match,
my flicker of hope,
press it to the flesh,
cauterize and sear,
burn myself clean so
I can move forward without you.
Melody
The way we danced—
leaves on a breeze,
a whirlwind of autumn,
taken by the song
only we could hear—
failed to wake the dead,
and they remained
beneath our feet,
tucked safely
in their graves.
I Am
I am my mother when,
exhausted at the end of the night,
I scrub with all my might to
scrape the dredges of the evening meal from
the bottom of the flame-licked pot,
unable to sleep while
it sits in the sink.
I am my father when,
wishing to be alone with a
book and a candle at a dinner party,
I manage to spin tales of
past exploits
that paint a different picture than
the one in my mind.
I am myself when,
eyes closed,
sitting on the couch, I
contemplate the things I
like and dislike about
the person I’ve become and
weigh them against the
notion of the person I’d
like to be and
the person I once was,
wondering why the tally
never seems to come out quite right.
James Ph. Kotsybar
Unmeasured
The lone, quantum bit,
unlike Frost, chooses both paths,
interferes with self.
Yowl
I
I’ve seen the minds of my generation bested by their handheld mobile devices,
texting for a dopamine rush, tuning out the reality around them.
I’ve watched them, withdrawn from present company, looking for bars of microwave coverage, friending strangers, downloading angry birds,
internet junkies, living in the ether, looking for that server connection to fame gauged by the number of hits they receive,
who sit in restaurants with downturned faces aglow, oblivious to their dinner companions, to check who has Twittered® them in the last few minutes,
who drive distractedly, causing fatalities in order to update their Twaddle® followers with TMI about their state of mind on the road,
who walk into traffic, updating their relationship status or performing Binglehoo® searches for celebrity gossip or obituaries,
who envision themselves as divas, broadcasting narcissistic images of every party or event they’ve attended in the camera phone eye, imagining others care,
who live without discretion in the digital age, unknowingly or uncaringly giving up control over their destinies to follow the latest manufactured meme,
who look with disdain on anyone behind the curve of the latest cell phone product designed to track them through time, space and potentially subversive ideas,
who are GPSed at all times, allowing local merchants to target them for advertising or law enforcement to trace their movements,
who are trained to demand ever higher speed connection, because they’re afraid to be, “so seven seconds ago,”
who fire up the Wiki at both ends, eliminating the need for scholarly research or retention of thought,
who self-publish their diaries and essays as open blogs, pretending that makes them journalistic writers,
who trust all their personal information to cloud networks about which they have only the foggiest notions,
who ask YSIC about who watches them watch countless MPEGs of people’s posted antics that pile up a profile of their tagged interests,
who believe convenience and expediency are more important than their right to privacy, conceived as an abstract concept of the elderly,
who are betrayed by the telecommunications industry they think serves them but ignores Constitutional rights to due process and even freedom of speech,
who post supercilious comments publicly, assuming they have the protection of anonymity because they hide behind a hash tag or screen name,
who, hands free, carry on conversations with the air, like schizophrenic lunatics, speaking to virtual colleagues, even incommodiously in the commode,
who require medications for ADHD and bi-polar disorders, never making the connection to their constant multi-tasking, dividing their attention,
who “can haz” perpetual amusement lolling at LOL sites, impersonally spamming inboxes worldwide with their latest animal pic find,
who post videos to social sites of the last vestiges of actual experience witnessed, and often disrupted, to make their disassociated lives downloadable,
who refuse to turn off their ringtones, assuming all potential calls more important than any movie, play or concert they might attend,
who think they’re the source of the Arab Spring and 99% strong because sometimes they can pull off a successful flash mob,
who are misled into believing they have influence and choice because there’s an app for that.
II
What routers have backed up the profitless souls naively sold to the machinery of control?
Telco! Dotcom! Dotnet! Dotorg! Dotgov! Dotmil! Dotedu! Dottv! Dotbiz! Dotint! Everyday your bandwidth fills with the addresses you occupy.
Telco, you are the new god of information, replacing books, magazines, newspapers and even postal letters.
Telco, the world is trapped in the web you crawl seeking content management and infrastructure ownership.
Telco, computer simulated, you leave no paper trail in cyberspace, so how can we know what really persists and what may have been censored?
Telco, whose phones are smartest for you and whose service is about limiting access to information, you are the true user.
Telco, your hidden stealth-bots relay the private data in our terminals that you cram with cookies.
Telco, whose attempts at regulation have been at least partially thwarted, your lies about protection of intellectual property have been anticipated.
Telco, whose plans to terrace farm the fertile fields will one day restrict totally free access, may you choke on the Creative Commons.
Telco, who wants to navigate our searches for us, leading us into realms most profitably marketable for you, may your electronic banks surge without protection.
III
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Cue!
In the middle of my act,
I’m pulled by my hair through the curtains,
wrenched out of character,
forced to see the sandbags and pulleys
behind the scrims and flats
and recognize
the stage for what it is.
Made to observe the gearbox of
Deus ex machina,
to understand its well-oiled magic
from behind the scenes,
I see the joke I ‘d been too in on
to get—involving too many,
too involved in playing this scene.
I only know my audience
as extensions of myself,
and that’s been just a role.
Motes in the spotlight
look for motivation,
and settle,
irresolutely flickering, unresolved to Earth,
and the globe’s no different for it—
becoming no more ponderous,
due to the energy lost in production.
I’m not laughing
as I retake the dusty boards,
stand my mark again
and, running dull fingers
through mussed hair, find
. . . not one line in my mind.
Open Mic
One thinks poetry is a couch to make the world play therapist,
or at least take note and listen.
One thinks poetry is a prayer book, calling the faithful to litany
or the faithless to become congregation.
One thinks poetry’s a vase to preserve cuttings from the garden
or store stony trinkets collected from private shores.
One thinks poetry is a rifle to shoot the head with images of war
or blast away the combat’s trauma.
One thinks poetry’s a bullfrog shut in a shoebox, ready to croak
or jump out inappropriately during show and tell.
One thinks poetry is formaldehyde to display pale, shriveled organs
or the internal parasites that feed upon them.
One thinks poetry is confetti, empty color tossed haphazardly,
or blinding shards thrown like glitter into the eyes.
One wonders if poetry deserves polite applause for its presentation
or if the art has been lost at the hands of these practitioners.
Go Ogle
Sometimes we miss things
that are just over our heads.