Poems
Life shivers between yourself and us: help us to stretch
toward the kingdom of our burrows in the earth: we’ll never occupy
again the silk-soft that was a womb, but we wander the night grass with you,
searching for a tenderness, an innocence at birth: until the quiet winds cut
the quiet breath from your mouth and your hindquarters stamp, Quickly, I must go —
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Shyness gives you a bouquet of weeds and tells you to exit
quickly by the back door. Shyness shames you into presenting
only a peepshow version of yourself. It tells you never to be bold,
to never give yourself the box seat. The shy can’t perform
A citizen of a difficult
memory, I travel at the full speed
of sleep. In my coat pocket: a fruit knife
to peel the sun, a wine
And as five zones th’ aetherial regions bind,
Five, correspondent, are to Earth assign’d:
The sun with rays, directly darting down,
Fires all beneath, and fries the middle zone:
The two beneath the distant poles, complain
Of endless winter, and perpetual rain.
Betwixt th’ extreams, two happier climates hold
The temper that partakes of hot, and cold.
Ovid via John Dryden*
... (read more)Everything seemed a catastrophe then
but I had things to prove.
From a certain point, there is no more turning back.
That is the point that must be reached.
Franz Kafka
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winter nights
days of looking
at the flames
and into the ashes
in the house with wood-panelled walls
‘I made bad decisions and for that I am sorry.’
(Oliver Schmidt, Volkswagen AG Executive, 2017)
... (read more)There’s a poem that begins
But that other wreck, where the crew tumbles out of a bad dream
and into a worldwide storm of interpretation.
Life is inhearsed, everything’s on affective hold for an hour
as the heavens pause. A melancholy playlist is blinking its lights.
It was the time when the awful narrative of their journey
was lost at sea, the violence of the weather and the politics
of humans and demi-gods all cast into the deep.
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