Tattoos: A lawn chair On the forearm, On the shoulder the Metaphysics Of river birds, Melody for a toy piano Near the ankle. Clothes: The attire is simple and cut To fit, No shoes But the idea of shoes. Metaphysics: No breath but air. Meaning: The real is put aside Like a bell on the ground, Like a trampoline at night, Sleeves pulled up at the moon, Distance for a logo. Appetite: Hunger like a table crowded with empty bowls. Metaphysics II: The cosmos on the lips, I breath in theology through nostrils, Pull its lint out of my belly button. In conclusion: The idea was to Fly a kite, after hitching a ride, To somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, Sticking around long enough to see Dusk pushing a shopping cart downhill. Coda: it’s getting late the science fiction of apple blossoms -------------------- x ------------------------------------------------- = tree tops cursive shoes How the volume of time Specializes in words Out of our reach.
Author: Bob Whiteside
Squeezing Cosmic Folds into the Joints of Neurons
“Truce,” said the wind. “Never!” declared a psychological Pear, “I am the table and the chair.” But you insist, Do shapes have addresses? Can they be reached By letter? What if there is an emergency Of lines And geometry is busy Can’t be reached By post? What if I am asked by wind If there is truth in the wind? You say that, The Wind Carries a stone fist. And a broken leg For a tattoo. That darkness has no wires. No boxes. No caves. No under the bed. No above the stars. It is as shirtless as a penny. It grows with the grass. It offers a chance To look around. It picks up the rain into the Ground. But I remember most The seams Of asteroids In the darkness.
The Birds Make Up My Hands
The birds make up my hands.
You can’t see my hands.
My hands are invisible.
But not the birds.
They have kept their feathers.
They have kept their language.
But stopped using words.
Words are all I have.
Now that the birds are gone.
Escaped into the outlines of wings.
The bone structure of silence.
Future City
Even worse. I found pieces
Of the moon under my pillow.
In my city you could be arrested
For breaking the moon.
There are few of us left.
I draw wings on the old walls.
I will never tell them.
I write about pieces of the
Moon on paper with lead.
Memorize 864,000. It is
The diameter of the sun
In miles. Even worse.
The pieces are gone. Rumor
Has it I never found them.
That I don’t even know what
Wings are.
I’ll never tell them.
Silent like a falsetto
In a parking lot of album covers.
And if this poem had a sharpie
Spell up the trestles
With the forgotten the names of every flower
How they haw and look at the sky
And, like me, never tell what they see.
What is Form but Prompting You to Turn the Page?
I know that you are tired of hearing me talk. And you say, I am tired of hearing you talk. I nod and say, the table leans a little. But that’s it.
Poems should lean a little. And cats should cry at the door to come in. Saturn whistles like a dump truck. A poet puts up graffiti in a city less tangible than the threadbare guts of being alive . Our fingers fidget like a can opener in a cloud.
Please don’t take this poem seriously, almost every letter is out of place, it’s a miracle it’s legible, and vastly improbable any of it is true.
Anyway, it’s a love poem
At night, there is a man whistling for his dog. Not even the crickets reply. Which is terrifying.
I open the window and look out. I too don’t hear the man.
A Little Resolution
Simple like an asteroid,
Arrogant like a few pillows,
Stamps like approval,
Not a funny poem,
Serious eyebrow poem,
Unbuttoned shirt poem,
A poem wearing floods and, in a sweater,
Vagrant with the fingerprints of an ill-played tuba,
Simple like how a carrot looks in the fourth dimension,
Simple poem about sidewalk cracks,
And if not for my complex feet: in the fifth dimension flowers are made of string theory,
I just want to write poems of unwanted words,
The empty bowl that only knows the echoes,
Is there anywhere for the universe to pull over, to park, to fall in love?
I’ll write poems too, small ones, by an open window, the moon like a dog licking a plate,
What’s to be whittled, and what dust, from what moon, did rake the sun?
Current Events
The world is brittle, and incapable of turning inside out. The world is anxious, and who knows if the stars believe in ghosts? The world is dusk, soiled collars, it is in the turn of a leaf. I write about robots, and railroad tracks, flowers, a list of poems so scrambled and disjointed and unlikely to be anything but scrambled and disjointed. I write that astronauts and apple blossoms have the same haircuts, even as the little yellow bird in the evergreen sings like the diameter of the moon. I write for habit’s sake, to fend off the April morning, to no avail keeping a firm arm span from the late summer night. I tend to a fiery garden, and measure its wingspan. I write the barriers are breached, the temples quacked, the first of the first snow breaks apart the air, and nibbles on bright darkness. The world is strident, and misadventure. The approximation of untruth. And yet I write of poems, how they dig in the dirt and find comets that have yet to hit the earth. That God is a few lines of chalk on the cement, and everything else.
The Cursive Guts of Calligraphy Bells
In the dust of nameless flowers, of the cursive guts of calligraphy
bells,
What ear can lift silence, from its sleep?
The moon, in front of the winter trees, Said,
All rivers are habits
Swung by gravity,
And
Each shadow that lifts a finger
Baffles an integer.
Electric footsteps play the guitar, the wind can hear you, science
fiction puddles, the tattoos of whodunit, the spacecraft of
deserted trees ravenously beatific.
In the prance of a quite walk, the city curls in on itself, till it is
gone.
I leave foot prints ahead of us,
Gaseous clouds
Turning star.
And give poetry
To pigeons.
Rain Water
A reflection In the rain water. Is The banter of something. In the Sentiment of somewhere else. This is true. A reflection is the sentiment of somewhere else. Pretending to be something near. Gave me your hand. So I can trace the serial numbers of your favorite poems. The umbrella Is a reflection in the rain. Standing there with its hands on its head. Let swim the daft fractals. Tie tight the headbands of angels. A reflection is A four handed polonaise On a two-legged piano. The fire from a star in a spring tree. We Who importune With joy.
Always With Us
The rain sounds out the road, into the windy streets,
The cosmos of walking.
In the end we hear the decibels
Of the sun, without the roots
Of dust.
Till then,
I write chance.
Life is the square of tree and moon.
Life is a squint, a DIY cassette,
A messy aim, a stupefied grin, and perfection.
That’s why there are stars,
Though always with us,
Over and over love is something else.
