Cops

there's a nursing feel to it what she does

with such familiar routine
but who will complain when nerve endings
are locking like that

disaster they reported somewhere down south
of the River of Life wash yellow flots ugly down
but this passes of course a moment assembles
around one tiny flame in a deserted house

three murders came in over the desk tonight
work for the girls you gotta
work it just like that earn your badge
tonight fireworks orange fire beers for the cops
made it to ten years in the service

watching streets
watching wind
watching up close your face so shy with passion turning

barren as dawn bleeding out
huddled in torn uniforms
no cars coming
.
.

Seiren Song

that made him yearn not for women not water's shades
some same cool and riversides
and rat-shatters and ice and low bursts

and green fingers stretching for his
only to drug as from strings words
out of him but to a night-sky whirled
in lofts within reach of that fishman

which spun from salt jism ancestors the while
alert to tugs the binary [fire] engine-putting
(slow as yawls) (moans of location) (mist)

over years over
humming shadow machinery
limbic waves of song

take me up he crieth take
in the Fall flowered as arrayed death dynamited

grey-flopping up murk-bearing O grim-aspected

fishman of fleeting littoral, falsehood of starry fishmen
casting of sparks, bearing of eggs, spuming of milt

some psentage've what hear've in dead channels
outflow've of a litl bang

your fucking tongue I know is our joint antenna twisting

but this, this, this...
.
.
.

(O untrousered apprishns of Phnicia
thy mermids ist none so faire—
what outspankered prismes, what
neutic flutic combes soonest they bare)

.
.
(Honourable mention in Inter-Board poetry competition, August 2008)

Commentary to Seiren Song by IBPC judge Tony Barnstone from IBPC August 2008

Yes, I know that this poem seems to descend into gibberish pretty regularly, and that it has absolutely wild shifts in register (from the contemporary diction of "your fucking tongue I know is our joint antenna twisting" to the overwrought alliterative diction of "fishman of fleeting littoral, falsehood of starry fishmen" to the archaism of "O untrousered apprishns of Phnicia / thy mermids ist none so faire--"). But, wow, it's fun. And I like those twists of diction, shifts and frictions of reference and rhetoric. Finally, I like the author's great sense of humor, as he blends nonce words in with the archaisms. I don't know what "outspankered prismes" are, nor what it means to bare one's "neutic flutic combes," but the newness and oldness and weirdness of the language are such that, frankly, I don't care. I can guess. The poem seems to be a Frankenstein monster stitched together from odd literary corpses and the bloody pieces of the author's imagination, written in the ideogrammatic method of that crazy old fascist Ezra Pound. But, unlike far too many of Pound's Cantos, this monster's got a jolt of life to make its limbs twitch. Watch it rise from its slab and wander the countryside until it's pulled in by the siren song of the old man's violin. --Tony Barnstone
..
.

Strix/Pop radio

flies found it
five days before humans
that smell
insect attack
fingers on keys

not even slumped but

purple-grey, mottled, the way they get
mouth slightly open/eyes still wide with

dry corneas
like something just came in
through the window
said no
wiped it all

no
[message half-finished
backlit/hot/whirring inside
screensaver
inactive]
off

didn't like their pictures
whirling any more

window still wide open
to that night

avid flies

owls' yaps outside

Pop radio
.
face just a bag
with a skull in it
.
.

dead love poem falling

all of me now given to this

moment of mirrored green
sighs O we now so so dark

can't hold you forever sometime will have to let you
your heat think of flight
of somehow light your weight your heft
you have heft you are real
though light we see clear through
your membranes into

the complex the conceit

that man so wild in trees
what did he mean by it
how fine we stared we started

to think that water so abominable stretched like that

I fall here fail fall
your abdomen like
no not tonight, don't leave now
with owls yapping no

want you all you all like the river the air
carries us up
where we fix

the weight of you the weight

a whole other human
loving now so hard
.
.