8 Verses

Magic Surrealism

 

You drove the auto, I at your side, up the windy coast,

Radio not on, while I told you, in all honesty,

Of reasons for it, of the other, and of place-changes;

I opened the door, quietly like, all understanding,

And away you drove, thinking something, or not yet thinking,

While I went inside, looking lossless, to telephone you;

I telephoned you, I told you all, that the deed was done,

Our love was honest, not like before, because you now knew,

For I'd told you all, everything of you, with nothing left out.

 

And when next morning. I heard you'd died. By a suicide.

I felt so lucky! I could see you! Without you knowing!

Your place was empty. For rendezvous. I telephoned you.

"It's sad but it's true." "We have a place." "Finally, a place."

You must have answered. I dropped the phone. I went to your house.

You parents were there. Packing up things. Would they never leave?

That's when I saw it. That scarf of yours. You never knew it.

You made it for me. And you never knew. I'll show it to you.

Come over tomorrow. The place is ours. You're finally gone.

 

*

 

The Little Comes to Large (A Sequence for Samplers)

 

 

Of Michael Bloomberg last night I dreamed

As tall as you and me

A mighty six and one inch tall

No longer three and three

 

His voice no longer was a squeak

Like helium infused

Instead a striking bass profond

His voice to me he used

 

Where once his hands were Barbie-sized

He now possessed great oars

That looked well-made for scooping seas

Or crushing oaken doors

 

His stomach once could handle not

Much more than mustard seeds

Yet now entire whales he scarfed

Washed down with tuns of meads

 

Erstwhile his stride could barely scope

A spider monkey's hair

But look he's leaped the Bering Strait

With gracefulness and flair

 

His stools of yore did not exceed

A moiety of a rat's

But now LOOK OUT BELOW's the cry

As fearfully he squats

 

How once a breeze would threat his gait

To carry him away

See now he crushes neighbourhoods

Each hour of the day

 

A Lilipute Gargantua,

A ha'p'orth croeseidian!

An elfentiny elephant,

A tsp. made Aegean!

 

Of Michael Bloomberg last night I dreamed

As tall as you and me

A mighty million miles tall

When former microns three

 

*

 

Black trains are coming for us all, you know;

So why not plan ahead? relieve your kids

Or relatives the problem What to do

Then with your arms and legs and head and such?

Your bodily remains, I think's the spiel?

Fear not! Our company provides a green

And eco-friendly future for us all,

To whit: sign this and guarantee yourself

A future space in one of our mass graves!

Each early May and late September we

Succinctly bury orgy-like and nude

The bodies of some thousands in a field.

It's cheap and cheerful what we do, and green.

We do allow festivities, fear not;

You can arrange in reason music even,

So long as it's approved and secular.

From the perspective of the government,

You see, the burden of your life on earth

Is shared and not your only own at all!

So licenced we, society, in full

By government (green green!) we offer you

A way your doubts (so nudged) will see our way:

Since now you're in the red of death: pay up!

You'll share your unmarked grave with all your peers

Who died about the time the same, so sweet!

(Funding provided by all governmental levels.)

 

*

 

An ordinary morning all around, I thought,

Sometime around eleven, if I'm not mistaken,

And really it wasn't until one o'clock in the afternoon

That my mind shocked itself with the revelation

You hadn't crossed it, in any way, shape or form,

And I had been alone and forsaken by myself

For really I wasn't sure ... how long ... the night before?

 

To think: my mind had forgotten all about you then.

Fifteen years before you'd meant the world to me.

Every single thing in the whole wide universe

Was relevant only inasmuch as they related

To you, and all the things you didn't care about

Were meaningless and able to be thoughtlessly

Dismissed: that's how the world worked in 1990.

 

I recall running down a hill with a bottle of wine

Feeling impossible to injure or to kill.

We talked for hours in bars and you thought it was cool one night

I sat beside Bruce Cockburn and didn't even notice.

That was the shape of the world back then but devourer time

Thinks always otherwise and lives to break our lives

Into dust; and so with matter, so with spirit;

Even love becomes but a tombstone erased by rain.

 

*

 

Mirror

 

I was passing through the antechamber

Leading

To my room when I

Unlucky stopped

Before the mirror

That had been given me by

A love

Now dead these thirty years or more.

I heard

The mirror calling me.

I heard the mirror

Say: "Turn here.

"Turn here and look to see

"The tales

"Of yore, the fireside yarns that told

"Of terrors

"Hiding in the silver

"Of my heart.

"Look. Look."

I dared to look, to see

Myself,

Framed from waist to over-head,

Behind me

Mostly empty darkness

Save for some yellow

Glow above

My shoulder, so. I wondered

What

The mirror meant by fireside terrors

And laughed

So nervously she must

Have heard, for then

The yellow glow

Made motions none had ever

Seen

Before as if it had some thoughts

Concerning

What should take the place

Of everything

Inside that mirror

Including certainly

Myself.

The mirror said: "If seeing is believing

"Then you're

"The perfect faithful witness.

"That colour can't

"Be ever stopped

"Until it fills my frame.

"There's things

"That can't be stopped, not even by

"A magic

"Mirror, no." I wisely

Turned away,

To go to bed.

This wasn't knowledge eso-

Teric;

Images don't anagram mirages.

 

*

 

Lineate Your Own Poetic Adventure

 

Don't even bother trying to outrun the devil in the flesh because the devil in the flesh is waiting bleedingly behind a door you'll take someday, what's more the mesh you find yourself within is thin, diaphanous, and wet with afterbirth. Go struggle through the snow so like a lifeboat in a swimming pool and let yourself get fooled again by what the others say about the way that water is not wet, yet, travel though that yellow door before you think you have to choose (in case you lose). Regardless of the colours that you find, the dolours will encompass ev'; there's always doors in this the world without an end omegaton, and drop the articles as if you've got the name of painting in museum. So play them as you see them, boy, but spare the horse you're riding on because one-head-edly you'll never get a head for thought: your broken heart can nonetheless get broken further still, and anybody's guess it is why water is a solvent sought for salves. The world seems now beyond redeeming so, for what it's worth, why not put on some pants and go to bloody church?

 

*

 

A Place

 

Go not within the city limits, down the slope

That creeks when bottommost, observe beyond

The aluminum rail on creosoted posts

To where the water gathers in the lives

Of animal and plant, of minnow and

milkweed, of frog and frond, and fly, and flux,

And listen in the register that hears

The rills when rocks obstruct the way

The waters want to go, small sibilants

That chorus to a steady babble-brook

That runs both day and night regardlessly.

Can anyone imagine all the time

That's passed, like water underneath this road,

From future to the past while all this wet

Was circulating through the land and air?

Is metaphor intended here? How can a creek

Produce you lessons chronological?

So much of poetry's a kind of cart-

Before-the-horse wherein priority

Is placed upon the message to be made

Eight miles above whatever's really seen;

Contrariwise a problem can arise‑

And oftentimes it can't be kept away‑

You fall into religiosity

Wherein phenomena reduce to just

Divine expressions meant to give a learn:

The creek doth teach of mere mortality,

The rock doth tell of trippings on the path:

Thus nature gets all instrumentalized....

 

Forget the things you think.

It's really just a creek.

 

*

 

The Get Away Shuffle

 

 

The good stuff was flowing on the side of town

Nice to have a harbour in this trouble and strife

When we said get down we really meant get down

But now it was the time to get back to my wife

 

You can't get away

You can't get away

You can't get away with love

 

I ran over my story as I drove down the freeway

I'd been some other place, with some other friend

In the other direction, some place down by the bay

No questions to be asked and that would be the end

 

You can't get away etc.

 

My wife was awake when I came through the door

And I kissed her lightly wondering how I smelled

I told her my tale about the bay as before

As my made-up story I clingingly held

 

You can't get away etc.

 

And that's when my wife she did lay down the law

A bit of intel I had apparently not caught

That the bay had been destroyed by a nuclear bomb

And so for my tale she said not not not

 

You can't get away etc.

 

You can't get away etc.

 

You can't get away etc.

Two Acquaintances

"It makes one wonder why. Are you being charged by the table? Is that why you've buddied up? Why are you nominally facing one another? Have you had an argument? Please tell me, I'm seriously curious."

I was looking at her (my female acquaintance, who was sitting with me at one table), and at them (two utter strangers, who were sitting together at a nearby table), as she spoke these words. I felt like laughing at the blank expressions of the couple as they looked over their smartphones at her. The male of the couple said: "This is how we do things nowadays."

She tossed up her hands. "Are you siblings?"

"No."

"Is it then like a date?"

"Yes."

"So why aren't you getting acquainted or making googly eyes and innuendoes and stuff? It's horrible to watch. At least play some footsy under the table."

The female of the pair at the other table said: "We do things differently. You don't know enough about us at all."

"Well then I give up."

She returns her gaze to me. Since it's now the present, she says: "I consider that to be my good deed of the day."

I venture: "A bit harsh, though, don't you think?"

She shakes her head. "You have to strike against the virus of rudeness and ignorance wherever you can. My parents told me that, taught me that, and it's true. You're bleeding."

She's pointing to me hand. I look down and, yes, I seem to have absentmindedly pulled off two of my fingernails. "It's nothing," I say. Then: "Maybe they have different lifestyles."

"I didn't hear accents. Did you hear accents?"

Someone is standing beside the table now. Oh, it's the male acquaintance. He says: "Hi guys."

My female acquaintance says: "Hey! Sit down, sit down!" and he does so. "Look over there, at those people on their phones. Isn't it disgusting?"

He shrugs. "To each his own, that's what I say. That's my reaction."

Looking around in an obvious way I comment: "It's strange the mix of people in this place tonight."

She says, to him: "Do you talk on your phone when you're with someone?" There's some kind of scuffling going on under the table. Someone's leg must've fallen asleep.

"No, certainly not. But‑I'm not everyone."

"No, you're not. And don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise."

She laughs.

He laughs.

I accidentally poke out my left eye. It hangs limply by its optical nerve upon my cheek for a moment like a watch on a fob before I quickly shove it back into its socket hoping no-one has noticed.

She says to him: "Did you hear the news? A rap music artist who goes by the pseudonym Pop Smoke got shot in Los Angeles this morning."

He puts his face in his hands. "When will it ever stop?"

I ask: "What?"

He explains. "We suspect there's an organization of fanatical critics who hate the genius of hip hop such that they indiscriminately murder all those who aspire to the art form."

She says: "It's terrible what critics can do to one's career."

I say: "Maybe there's another explanation."

"No, no. It's an epidemic of extremist firearm criticism. Every few months: Bang!"

They are smiling at one another again. My female acquaintance is supposed to be smiling at me instead, but that's not happening. She spasms suddenly. There are more drinks on the table now. I take a drink and the beer turns red what with the seven teeth that have fallen out of my mouth.

"You're losing your teeth," she helpfully supplies.

"Yes," I say. "It's the price one sometimes has to pay."

She turns back to my male acquaintance to say: "Those two with their phones. You know what? It's true you can't tell a goddam thing about someone just by looking at her."

He takes a big drink. "Yeah. Maybe she's a brain surgeon."

"Do you think we can safely say she's alive?"

"Not with any 100% certainty."

"She could be the property of her phone, you know."

"Stranger things have happened."

They really seem to be amusing themselves greatly. I drink some more iron-infused beer‑don't want it to go to waste merely because it's 2% my blood‑and look at her with an unrequited love. I say to her during an appropriate lull: "What's he got that I haven't got?"

She replies: "I don't know what to call it. Can I call it ... colour? He's got colour."

Choose the final paragraph from the following list: 1) "Resignedly I say: 'How does it matter? We're all 98% cyborgs these days anyway.'"; 2) "The girl with the phone speaks up. She clearly has a British accent."; 3) "My heart comes out of my chest to lay down on the table. Or should that have been lie down?"