Monday, December 5, 2011

An excerpt of an untitled draft of a collaboration with Sheila Murphy

Earlier this year, BlazeVOX released Beyond The Bother of Sunlight, a long collaborative poem I wrote with Sheila Murphy. This is a new collaboration we started in March of 2010.

I've never seen stars like these

You call it the house on the hill, in Chautauqua dark
Your headlights spooling out road for us
I read the night through to you, a one-man play
and rocked sleeping in your attentiveness
Later I wanted to know what monsters you have here
parked, low on fuel, having eaten Valerian
In Ohio we had the melon heads
We had awkward children, maladroit, who took to woods
Know what I mean?
They're supposed to have huge heads, and are nuclear

Reading aloud to you the best I can

Those stars are clear stars, clean stars, brittle
We like it that way
cling to each other under reverse freckled sky
listens too for sounds, muffled by woods
listens for the passage of monsters through woods

Consecutive daisies wheeled in through improvised
Gestation marks the playing field as attendant
Quiet blisters that transform the asleep sounds
Macular and obvious and chore lined
As the choir moves in for herbal headlines
Clear to middling outré blanking on the jazz
From nights before the plenary apostrophe fest
Brained from scratch to have been owned
Again as if feckless choirs had mufflers
Tapped with fuel and left in park

You modest me when I retain syllabic
Hedge to shave and hand across
To check the level and the weight of pores
Against results of seed

The adjutant generic mimes leave home
And state names with built-in exclamatory
Roundness saves daylight to be heeded
Like Morse Code if anyone continues to be
Passage-prone and resonant with mantra voices
In the wooded plain a textual more
Like some caucus of the dark where weather
Claims to capsize all the cells we started
Out of foster air and brimming slight
less refraction than tandem misting
She was on the couch writing lists all morning
My fingernails had grown long and I'd shrugged off
some headache from the length of sleep

It's short--but I miss my alarm to a confused A.M.
Lindsay's late and sullen with rounded daylight
Her pores quietly glisten with adored depth
when she tells me about the sadness of the Fair
the results of poor people gone to seed
I want to add an exclamation to New York
placing so much that's attentive upon each other
I spin askew sometimes
I've always been too willing to run away
and in the middle of investigations

I break down faith to a drill-bit thaw
blanked on jazz as the choir moves in
Pretty soon everywhere I kiss you becomes a flower
I hang from my feet surrender torrentially
Unless I test these vessels calcified with indentation
The air will foster occidental elevations silk
stillnesses mum across your restless hands


Land mass has a forgiving storm
That acts out weeping for our fractions
Attending to the past resisting resolution
Points of clear young river taste me out of frame
Until I hamper my compatriots from scolding
Their lesser selves too willing to retreat
The key of G remains alluring to untutored
Witnesses pretending to be God of shoulders
God of should the rippling abs of the apostles
Raging in the mirror as though
Indentation pasteurized somebody’s milk
And it was blue again
The gender of surrender hastened inadvertent
Endpoints where the wildflowers are most
Tame and moist conflicted and still given
To falsetto numbness with a note full of
Remainders suspended where the exhalation
Leaves its evidence and someone innocently
Locates little parcels of familiarity
To name them something freighted
And yet clear to the touch
I've always preferred C-minor
and the way its velocity twists pianoforte
A clear young river could split my palm
like my lifeline pinches

In the morning we're walled-up in amontillado rain
armed with bastard lead and wrung with mascara tears
Fog muffles my throat as I love her against the mattresses
we've piled high and floral in the bedroom

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