Mousing Giant Steps, Scooping up the Soul Vibes

LORETTA HASKELL (Final Word Count: 5,995)

Prologue (Word Count: 976)

The chaos of poetry is one way to see the world. There are small moments and big noises, but forever we halt and bound to find something that is coherent.
But why?
Poetry offers us a chance to see the world as we should see it: completely ridiculous and utterly confused. Humanity is endlessly trying to catalog and place the little rocks on the street into order. But animals exist without order, and so should we, I say.
Without the constraints of “normal” society and without the endless banter of old dead white guys telling us how to think and write, the world begins to open a trap door to the shadowy and cobwebbed recesses of our minds. A place where waves can crumble and ants can destroy the dog, the world on its head is much more fun and interesting than the world where the cat is always conquering the mouse.
What does poetry do? Does it really matter? Really it’s just meant to make us think or even just stand back and go “wow, that’s weird.” We can’t always sit in the easy chair and poetry is like the mind’s treadmill.
Over the past four weeks, I have set out to explore what poetry is and what it does. While writing in a form of complete strangeness, I have begun to view the world through the abnormal lens that’s bent in the wrong direction. It’s more fun that way. Examples to follow shortly.
But for now
I’m going to go on.
What’s the point of structure? The best and greatest before us have only become so by defying what was already boring. We get caught up in styles and forms and the way things are “supposed” to be without ever thinking what it should be. Words have a way of dictating themselves and writing what they believe to be correct. Have you ever noticed that some words just don’t belong on the same
Line
As the ones before it?
That’s what I’m talking about.
Breaking free of convention and writing incomplete sentences, jarbled words (making up a few of my own and borrowing yours), and just over all defying what gets so dry and boring.
Who needs transitions?
Let us move forward, yes?
While I explored random word arrangement and free style thinking, I also did the base human desire of organizing…though done weirdly. Cento’s are like making a poetic quilt. You use lines from already written poems to create a new poem, one that makes some kind of sense but is really meant to just make you think.
Observe:
“Oh no, roared the tree dragging its long roots rhythmically limping like a sea lion towards her husband. For some reason there was a vein of teeth that had developed without jaw or appetite in the earth, like precious stones or metals. Then his son became the corner of the room. If you don’t stop, I’ll put you in a cup, screamed the man. Someone is not the chair but part of where, where a table and a blue in square is a window and some sky. And so the sun came in a room’s window and woke a person who poured coffee out of a cup into his head” (Edson).
It can be whatever you want it to be, mean what you wish, and stand for what you want.
I’m not going to argue.
And who can tell what’s really what?
Throughout the poem, I’m playing with forms and the dismissal of automatic language. Struggling to be estranged, I found the most basic items, like a table, becoming something exotic and exciting, like manipulated earth; skin as porous paper and fly swatters as apocalypse. The list could become endless, but I’ll leave some to mystery and imagination.
There is much to attribute to the random outburst.
The beauty of sunlight, dumping through a rubber glass window
The stealth of caterpillars, parading through the rattling china shop
I can’t figure it out
There’s nothing here that is centered
Moving
Or making sense
The power of strength
Fantasy
Versus reality
There’s something there that has lost its grip on me
I can’t see you clearly
Through a mist that you’ve swarmed yourself with
Fear is all I know in my gut
And fear was what I had lost
In battles before
Regrets are what I struggle to release
To realize what’s pushing me
Towards my final destinations
My dreams
Determinations
And the ultimate core
Of my being and strength.
Poetry harps the soul to extend beyond the borders
And clank together the dusty old bones.
I want you to listen. To care. To feel with me, the way I feel with you.
I sit alone, in a full room. The elephant of my past haunts my corners and brings me back to the moments I long to let go of forever. But instead I bring them to you, platter-like.
Contemplate the inner side and scatter the seeds with letters.
Some things don’t go into words.
Pain doesn’t go into words, though they’ve tried.
Love doesn’t go into words, you can’t make someone feel it through little letters.
Understanding does. I can’t make you understand, but the words grasp it. They’re the only way to see it.
I don’t understand.
It’s more than locking doors.
It’s more than avoiding phone calls.
It’s more than spiritual detachment
Or texts
Or stalking
Or nightmares
It’s my existence
It’s having to live with the memories
And nightmares
And the moments that tear me apart
Try and find ground after that
I’ve cobbled together what I can remember from before and what I can discern from right now. But really, it’s just a mess and I can’t find centered happiness. I can’t find resolve and peace. But through the poetry, whatever it is to you and me, we’ll enjoy it.

Mousing Giant Steps, Scooping up the Soul Vibes

Exploring the Options
Poetry. What is poetry?
Such a vast question. The question is really, where do we begin?
In poems, I see the emotion
That sits behind a person’s eyes, hiding from most of the world.
In poems, I see a peace, or maybe a piece of what we want most.
There’s pain and suffering, happiness and streaming tears. But I can’t ever seem to find a moment of solitude in poetry.
It may feel like solitude, it may feel quiet, but really
Take a closer look. You’re in my mind and I’m in yours. Maybe this is the essence of poetry.
Malediction and Benediction. The sacredness of speech.
I can’t seem to find the floor beneath my feet, as the words envelope my every sense.
Shklovsky found in poetry, the special kind of language that makes my world spin a little too fast. There’s too much color in a quilted poem. The cento is not for me.
Perhaps a romp with hymnity, with Dickinson and church song.
But God has always been too strict and the buildings all too stuffy.
Then there’s Edson with fibulae, writing from a line that needs interpretation, then running through the watery depths of mystery to find it.
Niedecker is unpredictable and the less ornate, the more the words will flow.
But what is poetry to me?
Mystery, color, feeling, and emotion. It’s action in the form of little lined letters.
The dainty mystery that surrounds a crumbling forest. The decay of cities that flowed past time. The rise of evil or the fall of grace. I find myself forever searching, tearing, and ripping down the walls to see what you want me to see. I won’t follow your advice, but I’ll find my place surrounding yours.
Whitman asks about time. I don’t understand time, a human concept that falls around us to stem the chaos that our human brains cannot master. We find ourselves in the position of superiority over nature (or so we think) and today I think we’re ridiculous.
Whitman believes in contradiction. In the beauty and embracing of contradiction. So do I. It’s too boring to always be the same. What grace is there in being stagnant, stationary, or dead to living breath. I find no happiness in schedule, in routine, in the harping of cell phone alarm clocks. Give me adventure in the daily life, so simple a thing with a dash of random flavor.
I’ll dance on the table tops and tip over chairs. I’ll trip up the stairs and paint the walls red, then blue, then throw in the rainbow to paint it black. Give me life and death in the same cup of joe and find me nothing in the bottom of an endless pit.
I wonder why we don’t find ourselves a little more compelled. Poetry is meant to inspire and free the mind and yet we stylize it to death and murder it, then bury the pieces. We wonder why it dies out, why no one cares to read it. But no one wants to play with a corpse. It’s all about change and rhythm and making it my own. I’ll do what I will with what you give me. But I’ll do it my way, always.
Give me vernacular over flowers. Give me blood and guts over dainty tea cups. Find me a crushing wave over a mystic river. Find me fairy circles and energy, give me too much water mixed with fire. Platonic thought serves me no use here, I’m all about the body and the mind, the soul, mixed into one. We’re all good, in the core, I’m sure though I have no proof. Atman, the spark of the divine, living in me and you and the dog and plant. Keep your hell and fire and give me truth. Give me reincarnation and unity of mind and soul. My body is beautiful, and so is yours. If we are in God’s image, why is the body seen as something so evil.
My words give me wings. And poetry is words twisted and architecturized into something unique. It’s more than simple expression, it’s a way of being, it is the core of humanity and the soul of the writer. Try to define a writer, and you can’t, though Whitman tried. His contradictions riddle the pages, but still we see him, a man of different views and living life. I’d have it no other way. But who are we to judge, the sun may fall around the earth, we are not the sun.
I embrace amor fati. Poetry is an embodiment of accepted chance. Why fear what we cannot control? Why not accept the life we have to live? Some say we have but one chance to enjoy and move on. Others believe we get to try again and again. Either way, what matters is happening right now. It’s time to embrace it, we only get this minute, this time. You can’t change the past, you can’t riddle it with your happy wishes, you can’t influence the future or stem the tide of sandy comings. It will be what it is. Nothing is beautiful if it has no flaws. The flaws make us unique and the flaws of our past make us who we are. What’s more poetic than that?
Does poetry study our mind? Sure. Why not? The Mind is the agent of the body, it links us to the rest of humanity and divides us from the person next door. It makes us happy and sad, it makes it healthy and sick. The mind is too powerful for just one person to handle, so we let it out. We scream and cry and whine. We whisper and talk and gossip. We giggle and laugh and go hoarse. There’s too much going on up there to keep it to ourselves. Poetry lets it out. Let it out. Find the words to mean what you mean. Be a little too random and see where it flows. I’m lost right now, but you’ll guide me back, my Mind will figure out where I’m going. I’ll celebrate that for the minute and write it, poetically, because it’s part of me, and I find it beautiful.
Is poetry the great almighty equalizer? If it’s us we search for in between the lines of random letters and strings, then can’t it bring us together? Vagueness is its muse and form. In vagueness, we all find what we’re looking for. It’s a black spot, no it’s a bird, no it’s the nest in a black hole of space, it’s nothing. We all see the painting differently, but who’s to say we’re wrong in what we see.
Poetry embraces all of it. It embraces the obvious, like red roses and loving you. It sits in the misty water too, catachresis is nothing to fear here. Don’t be afraid to stand in a pond, that’s trying to consume you, like a kitten without milk.
What do I think poetry is? I’m still not sure. Maybe it’s what we do. How we choose to live.
For example: I give you “The Instinct of Nature”

“In the worst of times
we do what we have to do

It's a choice of Instinct
a choice of Nature

But most of all
It's the choice of Determination
And our Will to live
rather than just survive

We will move on
we will keep pushing
And in the end
When the light grows too dim to see
We will sigh

And Instinct and Nature
will be over masked
by the life we were Determined to live
And the choices we made to Survive
Rather than just fold up
and fade away

The Beacon of Distance
and the Truth of Existence

is that we fight
and keep fighting

till all the final bells have tolled
and we choose to see it
to the end.”

That’s my poetry. That’s what poetry is to me, today. I wrote what I felt and what I saw and what I believe. Today poetry is random, overreaching, and an exploration of what we find pulling us through the day. Tomorrow it will be something new.
The Building of Space
“Sailing from a treasonous sea of attrition
The sea sits waiting in the cold.”
“of a poisonous sail
on a sea of conditions.”
I am in merciful contradictions
This is the world I never bargained for, the one I never saw, the expanse I never dreamed existed.
I feel too lost to continue forward.
The words are all that I have to cling to.
If you see the light, jump the river and keep walking.
There’s a beam ahead, I think I’ll find the way to Neverland.
If you see me there, just nod and pass on by.
Bionic arms and the heart of metal, I believe in the above, I trust in the below, do you see through darkness or believe only in torched dreams only.
I can’t see the correct path to follow. This was easier on your side. Today I can’t dream of anything more real than you. You were simpler in the past. When our hearts beat beneath different skin. The distance was fathomable. The break was longer. The pain was more real. The dream world has encapsulated me. The metaphysical energies are all in my blood, mocking the very core for which I previously existed.
You never saw it there. You never found the right path. Like a lion shot from the cannon of time, you growl through existence like it’s all yours to take. Time will not wait this time. If we wish to seize it, it must be now. Feel the beat in your blood. Feel the rhythm running down the wall. There’s a sticky nothingness to the world tonight. My bite, my heart, my cold dread of losing you. Of waking up to an empty bed. The love gone. The heart gone. The peace stolen from me in darkness. Again. I can’t dream further away. The nightmares have claimed all my subconscious hours.
There’s something in the closet. If I run it will slit my throat, spilling red blood across the green tinged sheets. I feel like a dream. I feel like fear. Smell the scents of sense. Feel the pulse of nightmares in your palms, where I find the knife plunged through.
Light doesn’t seep into this hovel. The hole of existence I can no longer contemplate. My fingers fly through letters like they were born inside the tips. I think I’ll swim in mercy. I’d bring you with me if I could find you, but you’ve drifted apart and the molecules have become confused, reconfigured, and lost to time. I see the soul, glittering among the stars. No matter how fast I reach, no matter how tight I squeeze, you slip forever through my fingers.
The past in passing taunts. It dictates the world I still live in. Past visions, past failures, the grabbing hands that pull me down to darkness I’ve fought to free myself from. I will be free. A Phoenix, born of water, that rinses itself in heavenly light.
Sex and envy, made into the slut they needed to get by. I was nothing. An object of satisfaction. The mind and soul was corruptible, they believed. Phoenix rising, falling, and forever fighting against their insanity. I will conquer you. Destroyer of your beliefs. Fuck the life you led me to, I will not drink from your bloody puddle.
Fight the urge to run. Flying feet never sensed an end.
In the sea of translation
We continue to search for the answers that we can’t find
Will never find
A tree may grow from blank cement
But the birds wings will never heal
You ask for the weird
You search in desperation for the answers to all your questions
Asking in all the wrong places
Questioning all the wrong prophets
What if I was your prophet
What if an answer was yielded to me
What if centuries had been created, waiting for this moment
What if the soul returned for the reason we could see plainly
What if
There were just no answers
No meanings beyond the solid
Nothing but emptiness and space.
Fighting Tendrils of Space
Think beyond the constructed reality. Fight beyond the tendrils that tie us to the earth of normality. Poetry excels and divides the sands we dig our feet into.
Jump
Then hit rocks
With your toes
Dug into sand
The waves
Crash
Against pine
And cedar.
Curls of hair
That grace a neck and ears
Glasses upon the nose
That leave the undeniable
Dent in purple
Sides
Of a face.
Dripping down the walls
Is the blood
Of past lives
And the harping
Of time’s
Endless procession
Through my life
And into the next.
Find your inner demons
And take them to the dance
Fleeing everything
From the angels
To the foxes
And find what you always wanted
Waiting by the fruit punch
In the basketball corner.
Life doesn’t wait for you to catch up and catch on. It just moves, constantly flowing, in the directions of its choosing. I once tried to stem it. Tried to manipulate the paths. But it didn’t listen. I got smacked with its bitterest reality and it still moved on. Now I just sit back, and go loosely, enjoying the gleeful moments and treasuring the sour. Why should we plan so severely? Why should we constantly juggle the harshest realities? It is possible
To monitor
From a safe distance
In a risky location.
I’m dancing in thunder
And shaking through the puddles
It’s too beautiful of a storm
To waste it
Under umbrellas
And without the ducks.
Embrace the strange, awkward, and overly weird. There’s something to that. There’s something refreshing in writing left handed and embracing what you never knew, or felt, or believed before. I reach out and touch your skin
When you’re six feet under me.
There’s something strange in the way your face looks under water. But that’s all we need to see, the distortion, in order to appreciate the utterness of reality.
Will you run
To the end of the pier
Only to find
Gravel
Inching beyond you
Instead of salty water?
Find what you didn’t know
And hug it to your thigh
There’s no better way
To meet someone new
Than to catch their attention
By being too odd
To bear.
The mind expands beyond our usage. We rarely see its outer folds and when the chance should occur, there’s always something holding us back and staying our motives. Being a sloth doesn’t aid our lives, it only creates the obstacles we seek to jump, only to find our legs are too stiff and wouldn’t have carried us to the jump, let alone over it. Being profound only goes so far. There’s nothing interesting in thinking like everyone else. There’s nothing fascinating
About being
Unfish-like
And swimming up the stream
With the rest of the silly trout
Thoughts.
I am not the completion of the circle, merely the start of a crystal. Good luck seeing through the facets, I will only show you what you need to know. There’s nothing interesting, in giving away all your secrets at once.
Park and ride
At the manor motel
I can’t see the road
When I drive with paper
And pen
Between me and existence.
Incongruities in nature
Are what make it so indefinably
Beautiful
Why must everything
Humanity creates
Be something
Plastic
Ununique
And stereotyped?
I don’t want to spend my life behind a desk, scratching a dull pencil against an even duller mind. I have a thing about living my life, not just watching you live yours. What would be the destination
If there never was a journey?
I can’t see two feet in front of me
But I can guide
You
Across the moor
Since I see your light
From here.
I can’t take a breath
And live
When you’re away
From me
When I can’t feel
What you mean
Or say
This is the life
The path
The moments
I choose to make my own.
Emily Dickinson Cento
“Much madness is divinest sense
I asked no other thing
The soul selects her own society,
The banquet of abstemiousness
To help our bleaker parts
Too sullied for the hell
As if my brain had split
And if forgetting, recollecting
The farthest thunder that I heard.
Are friends delight or pain?
Enlightening misery.
Riches were good.
I wonder if it hurts to live,
Finite to fail, but infinite to venture.
Impaled him on her fiercest stakes—
And if I don’t, the little Bird
Yet blamed the fate that fractured, less
Replenished, --faith cannot.
Till sudden I perceived it stir,--
Wisdom is becoming more viewed
Life, and Death, and Giants
Our lives are Swiss,--
Besides, the deepest cellar
To hang our head ostensibly,
The bone that has no marrow;
The brain is deeper than the sea,
Or a disgrace.
To fail with land in sight,
A thing that cannot ignite
The past is such a curious creature,
Salubrious hours are given,
I must not put my foot amiss
So slowly and cautiously;
Had there been no sharp subtraction
How sleek the woe appears.
With infinite affection
The distant strains of triumph
Our blank is scorning.
Hundreds have lost, indeed,
Have ventured all upon a throw;
Forty gone down together
If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I might have chanced that way!
‘T is but the ecstasy of death,
The heart asks pleasure first,
In just the dress his century wore;
The mighty merchant smiled.
Unmoved, she notes the chariot’s pausing
A pair of spectacles ajar just stir—
Grief, hills, eternity:
To fight aloud is very brave.
That we can touch the spaces,
And get the dimples ready,
Till we are less afraid;
Pain has an element of blank;
From tankards scooped in pearl;
He ate and drank the precious words,
I had no time to hate, because
My little craft was lost!
Whether to isles enchanted
In that immortal copy
The brain without its groove
I’m nobody! Who are you?
To lips long parching, next to mine,
The nearest dream recedes, unrealized.
The shapes, though, were similar,
And that defies me,--as a hand
Hope is the thing with feathers
Refining these impatient ores
On Revolution Day?
Give balm to giants,
Without a quicker blood,
For each ecstatic instant
The martyrs even trod,
And so, upon this wise I prayed,--
As laces just reveal the surge,
The soul unto itself
Surgeons must be very careful
Around a pile of mountains,
Menagerie to me
The mountain at a given distance
Is Heaven a physician?
You left me, sweet, two legacies,--
Alter? When the hills do.
What fortitude the soul contains,
The whole of me, forever,
With half a smile and half a spurn,
You, unsuspecting, wear me too—
I did not love enough.
Where bashful flowers blow,
As if some little Arctic flower,
From spotted nooks,--
Our life, his porcelain,
As if no sail the solstice passed
These fleshless loves met,
The fathoms they abide.
Lips unused to thee,
Of all the souls that stand create
I have no life but this,
For life’s estate with you.
Sweet debt of Life,--each night to owe,
You could hear the bodice tug, behind you,
Then, glancing narrow at the wall,
Wild nights! Wild nights!
With but a single star,
Did the paradise, persuaded,
Her bodice rose and fell,
That image satisfies.
The moon is distant from the sea,
That make the circuit of the rest,
I held a jewel in my fingers
Dungeons may call, and guns implore;
So I, the undivine abode
The exponent of breath.
It was the limit of my dream,
When bumble-bees in solemn flight
Pray gather me, Anemone,
Did they forget thee?
He fumbles at your spirit
You may forget the warmth he gave,
The heart I cherished in my own
My gypsy face transfigured now
Eternity until” (Dickinson).
Niedecker Cento
“Dark road home
The Congress away from home
My cement abutments
Even for death
O to be home to sail the flood.
By religion—slow in any case
So well loved
His holy
Slowly
Black sand
Peaks “tossed about
Like the crust
Of a broken pie”
The will of God?
The moss green Morris Chair
Often nothing to do
Now Pa, I’ve just cleaned.
I divined this comedy, Dante, before I went in.
We sink to water Death
Where the arrows
Adrift
And serious—
See it explained—
A man
Once was stone
Raided
In every part of every living thing.
Beauty: impurities in the rock
Radisson: a laborinth of pleasure
Iron the common element of earth.
Smell
Penetrating?—if you mean
The power of breathing (Epictetus)
A sense
What was her name
After Byron, Shelley
Spite
I knew a clean man.
No war
Why
Down here along the road
Some float off on chocolate bars.
Alcoholic dream
Flavored with bacon
I plumbed for principles
Grieving:
I melt the houses
With his rowboat’s 10-horse
In the night.
Property is poverty—
River-marsh-drowse
To weep
And condense
Frog rattle—
My life is hung up
Raised up
Space shot off
Always north of him
I’m in
Its Spanish story
Education, kindness
Now chintz at the window.
‘Revolutionary palingenesis’
Trees’ bloom with snow—
Comets you say shoot from nothing?
After storm shall we speak of love?
Quivering toward light:
Ten dead ducks’ feathers
Cars out rolling thru the country
With sheets so white it hurts the eyes. Nightgown,
A weedy speech,
I rose from marsh mud,
Where my mother was
Along the river
The trees where you pass
And now I’m on second floor.
A man works in two shops—
Nearly landless and on the way to water
The efforts of a life
The elegant office girl
A smooth blonde cool
Men are tender with women
She’s felt the prongs of her own advance.
Kept hotel till it burned,
A working man appeared in the street
Just before she died” (Niedecker).
Whatcha gonna eat?
Wtf
Poetry of syllables
Vernacular
Lol
What’s real?
Birds sraping metal barbs
Against white dirt
Wolves cawing for
The orb
Unattainable
Fighting tides
Of fluffy
Space powder
What’s held?
Beneath the brush
Of blowing
Breezes
In tie-dyed
Hair strands
Fighting waters
Struggling mesas
Victorious flatlands
Glacier scraped
And
Scarred
To make
You
Believe
You’re too tall.
Winged metal tubes
Shooting stars
Roaring through
Atmospheric pressure
And
Kicking up
The ruins
Of
Gravity.
Heat your back
With the shoots
Of ultrasonic waves
Light
That cusps
You
In the neck
Human.
Homo-sapien
Neanderthal
Ape.
Contemplate
A brush
Thrush
And rushing
Yard
And find something
Totally
Uniquely
Subsequently
Man.
I see no reason
Why
Women
Do not
Rule the
World.

If there was something to hold,
For a minute
I think it would have to be a star.
Think about the gravity
Of a situation
Where you can reach out of the atmosphere
And grip a two dollar star.
Would you cup it
With the fingers
Or whisper against the palm?
Would you dash it to the waves
Or lovingly stuff it in an outside pocket?
Would you forget it
And sit on it
In the middle of dinner
Or would you cherish it
On your mantle?
What about using the rays
Of overbright light
To guide the people
Of lost worlds
Back to you
And sanity?
Where’s the fun
In that?

A morning dove
Was once cawing
And the parishioner’s found it less desirable
Than its little cooing counterparts.
What is there in a sound
That holds our rapture in one palm
And our contempt in the foot?

The paper
This day
Read about a man
Who was shot
And killed
In a church.
Who can you trust
And find your faith in
If you can’t find protection
In the house of the great
Protector?

Imagine a point in the line
Neverending
That holds your attention
For more than twenty milliseconds.
Now
Live on the speck
And scream out for soap
To clense the dot
For what you preserve it
To need
In your wisdom.
Now
Sit on it
And manifest
Your yearnings
For the next speck
That passes by.
Look around
And loathe the speckle
Long
For an alternate
Placing.
Now
Think back
And see
Where you came from.
In all your rubbing
And scheming
You tarnished the
Point
That captured your attention
For twenty milliseconds
Because it was just
What it was
Without you.

Vastness
And wholeness
We are not
But a freckle
On the rump
Of Eternal
Space Time.

Continuous creation
Soul
And formulas
Of matter
Whatcha gonna do
When it’s time
For reformulation
Of atoms?
I’ll jump off
Pizza
Slices
To keep
This form
Cosmic
Moments
Longer.

I saw the ghost of a man
Walking down Main Street
He didn’t pass
Without glancing
Left and right
If I knew what he was looking for
I would take that hand
And point it down the left road
But what if
He wasn’t looking for anything
But me?
Would I be dead?
Rearranged in bloodless form
Or am I dreaming?
Mentally degraded into sightless unreason
Perhaps
I didn’t see him
At All.
Lying prattle.
Fear grips us to nothing
Beyond fear.

There are places
All around the world
That possess no sound
Of humanity
Where getting lost
Is how you travel
And finding the road
Means you’ve gone too far.
What would you do?
In a place without you.
Tree castles
And monkey kings
The heralds of toucan’s
And gossip frogs.
Liberate
Conquer
Hold on too long?
Blushing before the tangerine
You might find
We aren’t so “human”
After all.

Many minutes
Do I think
That there’s something
I’m holding
Without knowing.
There’s too much
We’ll never understand.
Ignorance finds
Us
In every block of Existance.
I claim
That
That tree
Knows the cataclyms
Of space
Better
Than any man
Behind a glass
Eye tube.

Faith and food
Munch it up
Spat
And
Pizza,
American
Home base
And
Whatcha gonna eat?

“Except to heaven, she is nought;
Except for angels, lone;
Except for some wide-wandering bees,
A flower superfluous blown” (Dickinson 215)
Following numerous translations:
Except you heaven, it is worthless;
Except will be angels, lone;
Will be added except bees-wide roaming,
to the flower superfluous blown

“Death is a dialogue between
The spirit and the dust.
‘Dissolve,’ says Death. The Spirit, ‘Sir,
I have another trust.’” (Dickinson 216)
Following numerous translations:
Death is a dialogue in
of alcohol and powder.
"Dissolve" says Death. Alcohol, the `Sir,
I have another trust. '

“The eye
Of the leaf
into leaf
and all parts
spine
into spine
neverending
head
to see” (Niedecker 241)
Following numerous translations:
The eye
the sheet
in sheet
and the entire backbone
of parts
in the head
endless
the spine
see

Final counts
A word through mesh
Scrambles
The answers
And the testaments.
Translate
To untranslation,
What’s lost
Between
The dictionary
Sheets?
Spirit and dust,
Alcohol and powder,
The wards and wars of
Forever’s
Damnations.
Sheets and spines
The rivets of bodies
Rather glued
Or harnessed,
DNA
Or literature
Travels
The spines
Of books
And bodies.
Alcohol’s other trust,
Its body
Of worms
And derationizing
The head cells.
Bees-wide roaming,
Roaming from
Millimeter
To millimeter
Along the honeycomb
Trail.
Heaven’s own person,
The rustle’s of dreary
Overused
Legs and arms
Worthlessness
Bound
In a fleshy bone cage.
What meaning
We find
Lost in translation
And keeping dead thoughts
Tucked
Passionately
In velvet layered boxes
To be bled across the sheets
And into harmony’s tendrils.

“In the cellar the instrument is best hung by its heels like a ham” (Edson 113)
Following numerous translations:
In the basement, on the best application starts with the heel as ham.

Heeled ham
Hung
Swing
Rafters snapping
And snarling
The dead do keep
The hearts
Of the living
Black tongues
And silken eyes
The meat of restless bites of humanity.
Refrigerator
Cools the ham
But what if the ham
Contained the fridge?
Conundrum
Confusion
Collywaddle.
A fly circled porous paper and felt important until apocalypse smacked it into darkness. Where does being begin and when does begin become being? The fly flicked its wings, and believed, therefore it began. Circling spinning sky blades and connecting with invisible trees, the fly doesn’t begin to question its being. The human washes vanity with materialism and begs for more when want is not needed. We begin by being and questioning. The fly, who exists to be and bees don’t see it. The human who contrives and complicates simple. Apocalypse in hand, fly upon the manipulated earth surface, darkness and the fly reaches existence first.
Who’s the top of the chain now?
The corpse creaked its bones until tambourines became preferable. Racket and ricocheting blasts, symphonies of dead tail bones. Put the left femur in and keep it from falling off! Hock the pokey and spit the larynx cross the room!
The toes complained of weight crushing their corns, the head wished stars were buried under protons. Ridiculous, my ears are ripe for picking and squishing them you are! Stars that burn too far for man to reach, that’s grasp worthy, fool, pick that out of your nose and eat it! My corns, my corns, their loveliness divine, I prune and comb, pluck and nurture, your protons can spit seeds! The small matter swirling through, creating and destroying, you worry of corns, so earthly and small, so menial, insignificant, blasting through earth time like freckled butter. Agree to stick to our own! Never! Your squashed sentimentality can go dig and die!
Secret squirrel, whispering to precious life nuts
Boy jogging through man path
Mistaken existences
Higher pitched scream.
The TV watched his human, claiming conquering rights. Flashes and gestures, voice boxes and legs and nakedidity. You will be mine, specimen! Watch my pretty colors and soft porn, you will be purring and I will like it. Declare the world ours and find a pretty corner, to rot and wither, dry up and I win. Yatzee!

Works Cited:
Dickinson, Emily. The Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson. New York: The Modern Library, 2004.
Edson, Russell. The Tunnel: Selected Poems. Oberlin: Oberlin College Press, 1994.
Niedecker, Lorine. Collected Works. Ed. Jenny Penberthy. Berkley: University of California Press, 2002.