An angel has no memory.
-Pygar, from Barbarella
Walk
Author: Bob Whiteside
The Dents of Highway Laughs
Begin in the knees of the earth.
Walk the dizziness of
A poem that breathes in space exhales into the void.
Remember the
Tomb tipping
Guts of spring,
The sea and the eyelashes
Defying gravity,
The ping pong playing peonies
Of electric yesterdays.
Remember how
All at once
The universe put on
Its legs
And walks like
A fiasco of names
On a checker board.
Will you walk with me?
In the opposite of acquisition?
Who else can see these widowed months?
Beckoning at the table
Where is the pen and paper that ribs time and space with the dents of
highway laughs?
I walk and walk,
In a coat, black, collared, the curve of which almost touches the ear.
No hat.
What is it in us that allows us past narrative ghosts?
For this I penciled in the page and erased around the poem
Like an astronaut fills the page
With the memory of a jellyfish.
I stayed up all night
Playing solitaire
On the PC
With the radio on,
Curating the ramblings.
The soul is a runway for anything
Willing to fly.
What do we know?
It is only afterward
A sense of being.
Niagara River
Solitude forgot its wallet
Not bothering with conversation, solitude sees if its diaries float
Each letter of solitude was offered a role in a comic book movie
Solitude of a few shirts, and feet covered in the leather of old shoes
Solitude of waste basket prose… the emptiness of a flame
The noise sweeps the heart
November astronauts are solitude
The universe is a tee shirt looking for a ride home, solitude of a
bicycle
And lonesome like a cartoon coyote
But what of the falling leaves?
It’s impossible to count them all. All the leaves. But what if
counting had an out of body experience? Took LSD, and
began licking its Zen palms?
In conclusion
Almost night now
The hurry of pillows and the dot that is the moon
The gulls are
Mugs restaurant-white
Dropped along the shores of one of the Great Lakes
Across the river from Canada
Garage Sale
A well-kept bike, a stack of poems in disarray.
What if these poems really did mean something?
How terrifying!
~
The books on the fridge, I’ll get to them soon. After a walk and a few more months of procrastinating. I’ll write poems too. Small ones, by an open window. The moon like a dog licking a plate.
~
Mirrors reflect, yes, but they
Don’t know left from right.
~
A tee
Shirt
Upended
By love.
The unsettled
For a nest.
The universe
Makes for funny haircuts.
~
To sit quiet and remember
The shadows of the heart,
A sea above the stars,
Till you are nothing more
Than a memory yourself,
Till you are at sea
And above the stars.
~
Metaphors undone.
Purposely forgot. An amnesia of flowers.
A calligraphy
Of absence.
The pigeons downtown
Are the last of the angels
In rock colored coats.
~
These unknowns!
With blue songs in their feet,
As or husked brains squeal like throbbing beheaded nuts,
And the blue ears of the moon
Tremble with the arson of love.
The Cosmic Microwave Background Blues
The abyss is flat
And has no bottom.
It is a vagrant simile
Loitering on two
Legs carrying a bowl
Of wishes,
A grocery basket
At the elbow.
Isn’t that nice?
But don’t ask me to look back. There would be too many
Other of me in the way.
I’ve the multiverse blues too.
Singularities
I Absorb Via neurons Approximations In favor of survival. But what of the poems that weigh Less than a few pebbles? I’d like to tell you more, that there is a counter weight to approximation: The square root of UFOs, The moon grew antlers and stopped wearing clothes. What’s left are the scribbles of dreams. A mouthful of dusk for eyes. Fingers like the appetite of the moon. Penciled whereabouts on the heart. You Pick up the few stones Of a short poem, Swim against the stars. The trees in October Are not the same as the trees in October. The cities of the Midwest Are wild with the loneliness of the cosmos.
Poet’s Style
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.
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 wore. 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.
