Excerpt from “I-5″

This is an excerpt from a novella-length narrative poem in blank verse I wrote called I-5.
***
Next to the car holding a drum stood
Samuel Jim in a t-shirt that read
Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation
of Oregon. He tapped at the drum as he
waited by the opened-up trunk of the Olds,
tapping the hoopstretched deer hide, so [...]

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Wire Shy

Though trackless deserts fail beneath our feet
And all around our junkie friends are dying,
The holy ghost is falling on the people.
Despite our souls that blaze more brightly the deeper
We descend, despite the truths we find,
The trackless deserts fail beneath our feet.
But even in this wilderness of steeples,
Where every wild horse is wire shy,
The holy ghost [...]

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Glossolalia

Update: I have rewritten this poem. I think it’s much better now.
Art is the politics of the soul, its republic common
But the issues that it wrestles with complex.
Each convocation’s opened by a flamen
But gaveled to its closure by consent.
The natural philosophers of sound
Divine the base mathematics of the wind,
Abstract exalted ratios from the ground,
And reveal [...]

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A parallelogram with unequal adjacent sides

That reminds me.
What exactly is a rhomboid?
The word made me laugh inside.
Diamond shaped?
The big rock that rocked the doctor
Looked like a boxy parallelogram
Or a cardboard box that had been crushed sideways.

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Like suns

They keep calling me… -Ian Curtis
Poetry’s more powerful than truth
And silence is more powerful than verse,
But silence breaks each time a poet sings
And every song a poet sings is true.
Other poets who have come before
Have sung more perfect songs, by far, than yours,
A sun that gathers planets in its train,
The monad that complexities obtain.
But everyone’s [...]

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Cavafy’s Julian Poems

Update: Toiling away on an essay I’m calling “Denying Julian.” Manuel Savidis has featured my poem “Reading Cavafy” on the Cavafy Archive’s “Cavafy on the Web” section. Quite an honor.
I was re-reading Cavafy’s collected poems for the third time and began to notice a number of poems about Julian the Apostate. I found the following [...]

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Reading Cavafy

I throw out history like I throw away
The business section, sports, the classifieds,
Or, sorting through the basket full of bills,
I throw away the many advertisements.
I only wish to read the urgent pages,
Epistles of remembrance and regret,
Immediate chronicles of losses that become,
In noting them, a kind of joy. In short,
Anything that fetishizes loss
And is spoken [...]

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Unpacking White Language

Unpacking a white language from a box under the coffee table packed inside wheeled luggage,
Unpacking the wrapping I packed around silverware from around silverware: unpacking a white woolen language from the box,
A white wooden language, a white linen language.
I unpacked from the white wheeled leather luggage in the closet
A flat wooden box wrapped in a [...]

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The Garden Angel

An angel of tin
Travels through the mint,
Dragging through the sea of stalks
A net of imperfections.
Drifting through the flint,
Trailing over mountain rocks
Her net of intersections,
Is gathered in.
Not because the lord of chalk
Made equal all directions
She gathers her scents,
Shaking loose the wind.
The scope of her collection
Exceeding that of men,
Has in time no twin,
Still, was made in time [...]

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The Advent

The day crawls by on pins and needles,
Prickly with heat, as grey with tedium
As a parking lot, as empty as
The prayers of middle management.
Of such days our lives are made
And of such lives the world. But Tuesday
I had such a vision as to
Almost justify it all.
In the sand beyond Palmyra,
Lucinda playing in the truck,
A [...]

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