Tag: featured
Kernel
Excerpt from “Kernel” from the book “Proof of Flight”:
“…You can devour all the life
off this rock only to find
we ate our only way to pray.
Doctor and priest both agree
on just how sick and cursed
I am, trying to get exorcised
or medicated out of my head,
while animals jeer, and shoot me
visions of a lone boulder trekking
impossibly across Death Valley….”
Download
Excerpt from Download Me Again
“…We shut down all applications
for a third of every day
to upload and download
the real each night,
our daily agreement taken
from a cosmic server,
with memory, continuity,
and a rigged ending to it all
to better move the story along
—a dream summoning of tomorrow…”
Apricots
Excerpt from Apricots
“…Bombolino dreamed of apricots
the night before he wed. Wondered
briefly the next morning what it meant,
such visitations in our sleep, portent
of a certain kind of sweet, a clue
to look back upon his life as warned
or promised in night’s gypsy trance.
Ah, he’s fine with chance. The plastic
razor dragged up his outstretched neck…”
Mortar
Excerpt from Mortar, Electrons, Breath & Whispers
“…Full cranium dump delivers my own absence of light,
inscrutable stars, lousy scratchjerk amateur’s film
that we all build in simple programming rolls
to play our piano in rhapsodies, pastorals, pumping
blues, hysterics, constricting cement, bleak time,
frustrated that our memories are made by only us
and lack the story, the arc, calculus of beauty
in movies played day and night at the multiplex.
Who of us leads a life that could sell popcorn?…”
Leafspeak
Excerpt from Leafspeak
“…Climate once was a mountain, untethered
now so the Mojave feels free to move over
the Sierra Nevadas into the Central Valley,
great green source of half our food. Worse,
much worse, is now ordained, but unknown
to us who refused to worship undemanded,
and must pay for our easy hubris, as God
will one day make me the trembling leaf
with one glance from Her empty nests…”
Once You’ve Been in Love
Excerpt from Once You’ve Been In Love
“…A woman’s hair moves at one-tenth
its former speed, like lace curtains
billowing off a shock of window
on a most uneventful day, the way
you sometimes might see summer rain–
a wave of linens hanging from the sun…”