Sample Poems
from The Other Poems:
Angela Lansbury Returns to Broadway*
Ever since January, I am always
seriously about to kill something.
MATADOR: Come along, mi faro cubano.
APPRENTICE: The exactness of your pants will bury Greek drama
in its hall of coats lit by matchlight.
LARAINE: I really enjoy helping children develop into healthy young adults.
JESSICA: Suck my dick, Laraine.
The rice in the Petri dish
is about to pop.
We could do anything. Anything could do us.
TRAVIS: I'm having a secure feeling.
DEATH: That's exactly what we are going to do.
CHIMERA: I understand now.
Put that dog back in the cupboard.
Give that beautiful woman unheard-of power.
*previously appeared in SUPERMACHINE
[Title presenting a situation used to multiply the lines of thought]
[Prepositional statement opening into the continuation
of the second line to the end of the first sentence]
SUBJECT: (descriptor) [Statement of personal action]
OBJECT: [Apology]
COUNTER-OBJECT: [Counter-statement]
NEW THOUGHT: [Order
put forth to
the absent audience
addressed to perform a new action]
IMPLIED SUBJECT: [Agreement]
MEDIATOR: [Question without interrogative punctuation]
FUTURE SUBJECT: [Directions
on how to place the verbal processes
in relationship to the reader's final adjustment of the text]
More available at The Offending Adam & Birdsong
from The Madeleine Poems:
Madeleine as Home
*
In one of the rooms, time gets really close.
*
One room is for the dog. There is either a large pillow or a small bed in this room. The dog is expected to die in this room. Eventually, the dog will probably die in this room.
*
This is the room in which you wake up. It is different from the room in which you'd gone to sleep. In this room there is always a mirror in which your face appears to be moving. Your face is not necessarily moving. This can be a disconcerting room.
*
This room with the dolphins is not entirely unpleasant. It is very wet. If you have things in your pockets, you should've already removed them. The dolphins' pockets' contents are hidden.
*
This is the room with the new dinette set.
*
In one of the rooms there are many wonderful big hats. In this room, everyone is wearing wonderful big hats, and if you are not wearing one, I will get you one, and you will wear it in this room with the rest of them.
*
In the orange room, the roses do not die unless you are looking.
*
In the next room, the chiffarobe is to be called 'the chiffarobe.'
*
In one of the rooms, a person has just arrived. It is then that the room has become something. Before then, there had been perhaps the idea of space, and a dark shuffling somewhere deep in the furniture, a stillness which is a thing, or which can be, though it was only then that you noticed it, the stillness then with the person in the room that made it a place, and if not a permanent place, then all the more a place for the transitive nature of it, like a music.
from Madeleine as Crusoe
***
May others come to it better than
I have done.
What I have done consists in the world
of what it consists in the world as—
the totality of and as
the totality of—
spring the season of combination, the blood-
birds symbolic of an Earthward-
ness, even Kansas becomes the opening out of
—what betterness they may come to.
***
We drew in again
into the hollows of a bridge—
little pieces, little and
made of paper or bread—into
the world as we found it
out to be—to be
this that could not be made—
or else to be—in an important
sense—the method of sound to mouth,
or of the world
to an ownership
of it.
***
Two is red; August:
the final number; the thing
is nearby; my brother
is strong;
and the storm then a piece
of coal and we:
not the engine but of
the engine.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)