MURDER ONE

The processes activities break drop and disappear
The crocuses practicate skates spear the mist
Multiple-intersecting plateaux pierces thought cluster
Terrible invective plateaux where the knowns muster mistake
Rhizomic electro-bio-chemistry flakes the proceed
Rise direct proto-metonymy burns the need to see this
Consequent chreods mitigate against change
Contributes desire to gain a range and shake it off
Complex analyses, described rhetorically from a podium
Raw sex banalities derived rheology spasm then hold
Theories of proprioception rapidly prone to field
Images, recurrences, memory, before tape stretches
Mazes, crucibles, metaphor enough fetches to stave off common sense.

-Allen Fisher. from Emergent Manner (Spanner 1999). more here. found in Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970.

HOW TO GET BY

          I often wonder
          just to get your attention
          I am usually indifferent to what I tell you, 
          scarcely endangered by hysteria 
          I remain on the coast
          & never go out further than where I can stand up.  
          The lazy valley is destroyed every afternoon 
          promptly at 4
          after that we have tea
          & go to the volcano at 6.
          Myself, I enjoy seeing deserts being made 
          & I try to be there at 8 every Tuesday.  
          Children seem to like watching the mountains 
          forming
          and are often dazzled as we trace a river 
          to its first raindrop.
          I remember having to diagram a rainbow in 
          the sixth grade   --   it left me limp for hours.
          Also I received particularly high marks 
          during the term on thunderstorms 
          (& here is where the girls excel -- 
          the boys being better at dissecting clouds).  
          But, looking back, it's the words of a bent
          hooded old matron that I've come to depend 
          most upon
          "My dear," she rasped, resting her shoulder
          on the wall of the cave where we were observing 
          the development of stalactites, "My dear, sweet 
          almond oil, oil of rosemary, & two drams of 
          cocoa oil massaged gently into the underarms 
          & insteps will carry you through 
          almost
          any situation."

-Maureen Owen. from "A Brass Choir Approaches the Burial Ground" first published in BIG DEAL 5 (1977). found here

An Octet… Upon Arriving in His Home, in the Town of Dieppe, Hungry

Whoever wishes to go to Florida,

Let him go where I have been,

And return dry and arid,

And worn out by rot.

For the only good I have brought back—

A single silvery stick in my hand.

But I am safe, not defeated:

It’s time to eat; I die of hunger.

-Nicholas Le Challeux, trans. Maurice O’Sullivan. Written in 1565, it is the earliest known poem about America written by a European. found here

Rock Me, Baby

Turning screw: In wave-guide

Technique an ad

Justing element in the form of

A rod whose depth of pene

Tration through the wall into

A wave-guide or cavity is ad-

Justable by rotating a screw

-Ishmael Reed. Orig published in Chattanooga (1973).  

Question

What is thy joy, O heart of man?

Delight uncomprehended;

When hardly welcomed, ended;

One unreturning moment’s span.

-Nikolaus Lenau, trans. Dwight Durling. found in An Anthology of German Poetry From Hölderlin to Rilke ed. Angel Flores.  find a copy here

Read to Me Baby

TWO BY JOE ROSS

MIDDLE: excluded

Plain said and said so. Page down Tuesday.
Oil wells and green field splinters, this year.
Old world poetry and the wasted paper leans upon the in us.
Dance rapid and tight, enough to notice and not care.
But to do and get done, already spent and not providing.
Your pension is our poison. Flowers & bombs at thank you.
Ten performances & awards, medals, honor – your substance, abuse.
We are grafted, held, and fought. Precious and few, on the mend –
torn, tattered, and made to mod. This rising retroaction
upon the spin, uneven, clean & shaven
This is dirty and obscene. A sight of laser light.
Pour that man a beer, shake the top down. Yo
mother fucker, new order hope.

A line that comes undone. Here honey your gun.
So sweet, so soft, so stiff. You’re malleable in form.
I ask for butter but will accept lead. Take head.
Your sex excites my mind. Your cheese runs my dog.
For you a thought must be inside out. And act – a divine
scream. Your center hot and melting rage.
I know thinly concealed – welcome to your world.
Now February, think of snow even if your not.
Try to cover in white, recover the not lost. I slip,
hold tight to this shoot.

There are tears in my body. Tears in you.
Tears in your lake. Tears in the world.
Tears on the take. Tears all over and really not a single
drop. Know what I mean? I feel has fell from the inside.
There stays the shell – take aim and launch. A site-on
Your cross hairs in my mouth. My weapon at your brain.
This kind act so.

-Joe Ross.   both from EQUATIONS=equals (Green Integer 2004).  found here. more here and here.

Idle Song

After such painstaking study of empty-gate dharma,

everything life plants in the mind has dissolved away:

there’s nothing left now but that old poetry demon.

A little wind or moon, and I’m chanting an idle song.

-Po Chü-i (772-846 CE), trans. David Hinton.  found in The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry ed. Eliot Weinberger. more info here

The Poem Number Zero

Don’t try to

read this or

make a sense of it

this is a dummy copy

don’t try to read this or ma

ke sense of it

this is a dummy copy don’t try

to read this or make a sense of

it this is a dummy copy don’t try to

read this or make a sense of it this is a dummy copy

don’t try to read or make

a sense of it

this is a dummy

copy don’t try to read this

or make a sense of

it this is a dummy copy

don’t try to read this or make

a sense

of it this is a dummy

copy don’t try to read this or make a sense of it

this is a dummy copy don’t try

-Saleel Walgh.  trans. Sachkin Ketkar.  found here.

III

Bell chimes update their nuns habits and car horns their clown costumes 
elevators go from the Prehistory floor to the Apocalypse floor 
typewriters on top of the pawn shops are embroiled in archaic soliloquies 
slot machine fakirs exchange words with statues under the shadow of alcohol 
gamblers play their last dynamite card 
scaffoldings boast about their aerial status 
shoes about their fraternal multiplicity of rhythms 
brooms know how to get up early 
fruit carts open furrows of fragrance amongst the passers-by 
cloths wave bewitchingly to popsicle vendors on their bicycles 
oyster bars and the young women who promote soaps brim with proteins 
traffic lights rise totemically like phalluses on the sidewalks 
red pyramids of apples stand in awnings moving like gondolas 
lovers of all ages pass under ecstatic bridges  
no one remains as firm and circumspect as the promiscuous building 
timbre navel
or greets with as much refinement as the pianist sun of chlorophyll 
the mountains distribute Buddhist manuals of air 
lady tempests go into barbers shops with their lightning sons 
then the cinemas are trains 
airports are clover 
temples are ships 
electricity pylons archangels 
fountains branch offices of Genesis 
black taxis stealthy widows 
bars floating trunks 
shop windows virginal philosophers 
families in metaphysical get-togethers are tailor’s shops 
wet nurses with black milk printing houses 
yoga sessions aquariums 
psychic freight terminals drugstores
billiard balls are moons 
hypnotic islets casinos 
bats umbrellas 
spiritualism centers theaters 
rockets hotels 
sumptuous hat shops clouds 
from striptease joints emerge crystal orchids divers from other seas 
from the open-air concerts rises a mushroom of music that touches the blinds of pensioners 
Sunday comes on stilts 
and in football stadiums goals rise to the level of the sun 
the dodges of football players synchronize with the acrobatics of the swallows 
a gang of ambulances directs from a Varese terrace
Bach enters the glassware shops with a harpsichord of fog 
in the popsicle carts sounds Für Elise by Ludwig van Beethoven 
Stockhausen comes out of the hardware store dressed in frills 
Van Gogh takes sacks of the best wheat to the poor quarters 
Villon drinks the wine of the parishes 
Picasso hangs a gangway from nose to nose 
Hans Arp releases his self-winding watches on the obituaries 
and many artists throw a fête that’s an effete sieste in the octet of the florets 
suddenly the park benches are filled with tickets for merry-go-rounds 
merry-go-rounds where children see a country full of metallic colors 
then the newspapers of the shoeshine boys are transformed into carrier pigeons 
high voltage cables into staffs with arpeggios of swallows 
telephone booths into lifeboats 
traffic signs into hieroglyphs 
and even policemen seem inoffensive grasshoppers 
clinics are marble carriages driven by the dying 
in the high electronic clocks one reads the messages of missing persons 
in the nomenclature of a building with a lightning rod is the winning
lottery number 
and in a succession of graffitied walls one reads the monologue of a dragon 
a dragon coming down from the chain of mountains since the cities began…

-Luis Eduardo Rendón. trans. by Nicolás Suescún. found here