Friday, July 26, 2013

Bob Phillips



fearone

your fear comes round above you
call it, indistinct, drone as disguise

you are not sure of its size
indistinct, drone as threat

fear, you don't understand
so large, you figured stick figure fear

you expected sound like reprocating fan
got jet damped stealth now

and folded wings
on carrier elevator

for your own good, darlin
in loco parentus, so you need not fear

idling, fear, outside your peripheral
sense, someone watching, deja fear a chill

fear hairs stiff, fear skin taut
eyeball shift at edge

drone painters beam dots
dance day and night your surfaces

little livid pimples of fear
someone in a cooler van chuckles

fear got you, heh he, heh heh
fear got you now

you jump like cat, on reflex
follow the dots, pahnt fear

your fear comes round above you
call it, drone as disguise
deja drone fearone

Friday, July 5, 2013

Mark Sargent



FUCK NOSTALGIA for Doru



O cradle of the big lie
fuck nostalgia
the time zones work
so that it feels latitudinally
sync’d but nothing, fuck it,
is so.  The chronic tick
on the doom machine fuck
the fear of returning
that too
but still, yr spew anchors
in sprinkler & radio rant
oh say can you see
the dog peeing
on the barbecue
and that Austrian guy confusingly
calling himself me
but nothing is possibly new
and everything responds
to fire
which can’t be fucked
but sires
ash, pain, energy 
and heat,
faster than sun and trucked
in from Hun-fucking-gary
right thru the iron sphincter
like a dead-bolt dictator
posing before cardboard harvests,
papier-mâché donkeys,
piñata explosions, I mean,
is Romania about anything?

Here we suffer from phantostalgia,
the longing for what never was,
how odd to be the opposite,
the alternative or doppelganger reality
that drives all blames away
to a shimmering artless righteousness
a Teflon comprehension
you don’t encounter much seersucker these daze
or any who see much past the eyeball’s range
but the curve of planet, the fact of the sphere,
is not to blame.


“would give and spread like pliable,
well kneaded plasticine”
Javier Marías was talking about a mouth
but you sorted that
nerve fibers bouncing through the blood vessels,
mind too kneaded by pain
into survivable form
“it’s alarming how easily thought and speech
contaminate each other”
mind can’t believe what it is fucking hearing,
utterly flummoxed.
It discovers it can’t control the mouth anymore
and takes to clamping hands over it everytime
it senses imminent speech
but to no avail.
The arms tire but the mouth does not,
it feels like a youthful Fidel on May Day,
an amphetamine deathbed Artaud streaming
from the netherworlds of consciousness towards
a dark gash dissolving on the tongue,
a stomped-on-the-tail cat electric word fry,
all mental appendages at full expanse,
I mean fucking language ricochet blindman’s billards
on board ship in heavy seas.
O snookered by words
by heart beat by the whole dreary thing
and you discover you’re always
just lagging to the far rail.

Casey Bush




HISTORY OF RAIN

it’s not just precipitation in the gauge
but a paroxysmal bitterness
turning this bloody sock inside/out

crows pick through garbage
spilling dark fluids down the sewer
destined for some distant ocean
evaporating into an unsuspecting sky
and once again jettisoned by the clouds

street person in the backyard
doesn’t request entry into my house
but refuses to leave the premises