I let the reins go
by Joseph Milford
form,
and the contortions of yours
and mine,
these lines kill country roads
with tentaclic
lustful scrap
clinging trigonometric
against gravities
of stated moves
and slated troves
of ions
of what formulas
what next? the golden ammonite
curl of the tongue
hypotenuse of hyperbole
megaspeech
logostronomy faulty arches
still spew their lights
we engineer rhapsody
dance more, closer now there’s an edge
how will I build the body
that can withstand
such seizures as these
the fact or glimpse improbable
equal
the miracle of aptitude amalgamous
all the gymnasts
fall to the floor from atop the pyramid
in a mass of wincing
snap of syntax
fluid through tubes
from combustors
jetstream navigators
from speeding bikes
ask any attendant
the maps are legends
put Tarot cards in your spokes
ride hard hellkites, ride hard
for the itinerant
the completion of every
sentence requires cage and gauge,
passport and deutschemarks
someone on the web just got erected
broadcast quotation
obscurity is not the maze that one thread
of crumbs can lead you out of anymore
your poem slams shut like mousetraps
caught in crab-cages and you are afraid
to investigate the trembling other end
of a taut rope caught somewhere deep
this fence of thought not yet built with the bird perched there in mid-air waiting for dimensions
to be perceived and to flesh and feather them out
ontology recapitulates philogeny
and after all this time you still don’t love me
the mafia of language won’t release you alive
once you’re “on the books,” y’know, a “made man”
you are done, neck-tied, hobbled, etc. you are
cappacello for the dogs and scraps for pigeons
and being that there are no man-made words, well
then there is no release, no witness protection
relocation, you see, we have found these sounds
they were a tight family well before our time, fellas
physicists theorize that the entire
unknown/known universe folds
about itself much in the manner
of a burrito. let these conquistadors
still starve, these hagueros, these
bastard comprachicos, let this jungle
of substrata kill their own
in the way of the viral world.
this tangent
has order
its chaos
the higher order
that I am unaware of
(obviously!)
and, I am always entitled
to my disclaimers
(I wear them like a raiment)
O night negligee of nascence black alliteration punctured with celestial prisms burning!
contorted
centauric verse
wrong, staggered
drunken, maned, trampling on orchids
randy fevered forest-lost
adrenal rush
of life equaling death
the continuum must balance
in the next next
get out of the vineyard
play chess with other oracles
you are folly without youth
Love’s quiet moccasins
Love’s empty holsters
Love’s thorned tiara
Love’s hood ornament found in a fishing net
Love’s tick embedded in your lover’s hair
Love’s pendant hung from an antenna atop a skyscraper
Love’s psycho jumper cables
Love’s ridiculous, love’s enablers
I am the mass-hallucination in the mess-hall for an army that only eats ink from a pen writing a pinpointed vintage of vantage points.
the grimmoires of grace got left open. so it’s open risk season at your shack. get the shells. be stillness by the still. the amphitheater of the forest has too many voices. the old southern catapult and the new evil maladroits. be ready and stocked and ready to be readied. jinxes have their numbers on you.
heist of poltergeist anger
locked in ampules hermetically
sealed telekinetic valences
these crazed pharmaceutical co’s
trying to colonize souls
basically, there, I
said it again fill this inscription, you
industry-fed bitch
the fragment’s fragmencement is a direct answer to an indirect question asking itself why ask.
The Golden Mean is mean
the ammonite, the beehive, the magnet’s coils
there is no flow other than the desire for flow we provide
and so nature is pitted against
human nature
frontal lobes and ganglions wrapped around their own DNA spirals
and vice-versa in the spiral
the pit of the pear
vs.
the pit unfillable
at least that’s how I see it confounded as I am without compound eyes
The ballast of a tempest Plankton, from the Greek “planktos”
being more dreadnoughts to wander, as words do, I say to them
than what it destroys that I am a hungry blue whale
and there is no honor
among weather patterns
Autarchy, I am building a propulsion system
for my artificial island.
Don’t say malarkey.
Hydrostatic, magnet vs. magnet.
My wall vs, all the walls of the world.
Nodus: this notice hereby prohibits not having one.
You live in that treehouse
on the edge of the cliff
and dangle your
rope-ladder down.
I am Euripus.
Find me somehow
contradictorily eurythmic.
Quotha! Quotha!
Cover me in plaster! Make a mold
and break over the stubborn brow
of the original! We’ll have our neoclassical cloning!
I’ll pick the mosaic from the pieces.
I’ll sell the tiles down on the open market.
Whippletree, clevis, etc.
One word always tows another.
The madman wrote the Oxford.
It broke his stamina, without question.
The heaviness of books, lead coins on eyelids.
The sacral-cranial bend, the hump beginning to rise
in the back.
Got hit by a carcajou.
Got trampled by a megapod.
Once in Canada, once in Australia.
I love weirds and words.
I have reached apogee.
with you my reader
or have I a slower
moon’s path?
I can’t do the math.
Paths of moons should be slower
(you were right) being a peaceful
beach-lover an studious of tides.
In a few day’s time
my form will burn away
like gold becoming lead
so give me a few days, okay?
Iamblichus, hand me my staff please.
This song needs be noted.
My pathology is the merger of all ologies.
This nature of my addiction.
The line itself is but a Cadmean victory.
The earth rotates under the axis of this pen, at times.
It is all so boring that we actually have the time to archive. This world’s very existence says something pending.
Keep good records, corpse.
Initialize the copses.
Awe that glittering it mauls hold.
It was excitedly original how
the piece wholly unforgave itself.
She wiped her lipstick on a lamp-post
and walked away into an American ethos.
All amidst the petroleum-fed dinosaurs.
The stars were stuck fossils.
The horizon has always been placated.
Freedom, I’ll pierce your tongue for you;
Truth, take this last doubloon.
I’ve no more use for this green card anyway.
I’ll see you all there in the end, on the short day.
Together, purblind in the ambushing glory.
for such malfeasance, a slap
on the archaic
with a wrist is in context
blindfold me first
prop me up for the firing squad
then, don’t shoot me
after leaving my lifestyle of tempting executioners
I will soil some other Siberia
I’ll become
an alcoholic, a compulsive
gamboler across the planes
I’ll entice the local farmers to kill my father
no chronology
the blanks at close range can still kill they can end the lives
of the sons of dragons the newfoundlander genius runs amok across
the tundra-muck from a battalion of cardboard riflemen
and publishers
and all cultures and legends become one in the can
the celluloid and cellular
absurd that I am the catamite of the genome my bitterness genetic (sic) it coils about its own perfection like a billion years of progress just for the achievements of maybe gills, or a thumb.
what broken glass shards now found
by bare big toe later? the only truth
left to write about, get the tweezers.
such august moments make me reprobate
(oh shit!) here comes my officer (I’ll get back to you
more later . . . )
to the great poets I say:
thanks for the hailstorm of wailing
metamorphic sulfurs, the swan songs,
the armies, and all of our chauvinistic
hermaphrodites in waiting
my heart lives under a bridge
it knows riddles
it eats children
it has hands like a blacksmith
its secrets are blood-bruises
nothing to pity, there is no vocabulary
for the bent ogre in the crotch of a gutter
he is wisdom, wise, and knows
he repeats wherever he goes
either you have a death-defying love
or you are a daredevil
let’s bungee into the infatua-vat
and sashay into the accua-station trap
let’s get our meatgrinder experiences
within that yellow-tape perimeter
swell to antithesis, boil there and swelter
and when the bubble bursts we will all know and fill
Nowhere to begin in a snowstorm. I just heard that fly’s wing.
Make tracks? Avail? I heard the same one that night we met.
Leave drops of blood? We ate, went to the efficiency, kissed.
In the mildewed hall-closet shower. We were hiding from that old college.
Conversation, i.e. “the future will call this road A road.
I wish certain moments were quarantined. I may as well pull all the grasses up.
Out of the Earth. Pull hair there (something activates).
Look, flies everywhere. Look, snow everywhere.
You are better at me than this.
Like love or a skull-crushing can happen in the same alleyway at any time at the same time.
The rat of the wharves is always the same rat you see; if you see him in numbers, then
cash the chips in. Take it from one who flew in on a guitar and out on a greyhound.
I can make the best appetizers, and I can wire a house. I have a beergut America-style.
I wonder should I own a gun. An umpteen-alt Heston. But, the ferret always needs another operation. It’s not affordable, these jobs, fads, and juxtas. My modus apparatus is a given notice
of nodus, sub-operatic sitcom. To be sure, pathos is no path, although every path leads to it.
Build a playground in a Third World country and let the survivalists worship it.
It’s fitting, it is a cathode ray to bring all to us. Proper perspective of talking heads.
It’s a fiber optic out of context fed to a last nerve to get on an alien monument to decipher
per every destination.
It is love or death in an alley dialing a dictator
“He’s a purist; be one.” We make
so many deals, electric eels in suits of magnetic fields,
Doppler wares of doppelgangers all marching towards a lemming horizon.
You are better than me at this, out-fighting fire with fire and breaking
free finally from wet paper bags to careen through new detritus.
Stole the anonymous journals
from the exhibit, took off my
gas mask, extinguished
the lamp my hard
is a foreign artifact
when opened, a marvelous alien
thing. I am out among the pimps,
the blues men, the lovelorn and the drunken.
Still, I recognize no kin.
Staring down the barrels of divine cannons
as the flint catches.
spark. The fuse quickens.
How even in the safest modes of thought
I end up paraplegic and face-down
in a hailstorm.
“If you will just shut up a while you will learn something,”
was no way to begin a poem.
Nor was “emu stampede”
or “whorehouse burning on a New Year’s Eve.”
I’ve got lots to learn and a short straw to draw
and hang onto.
I am a name on the fingertips
of my own sculptures.
I was crushed under the weight
of the interminable world,
like a wus, like a crybaby.
Golden ladders and philosophers’ stones, man, my closet is ersatz full.
The gods can pick their teeth with radio towers
all they want, my nickname still is “toothpick.”
My lies are slippery, like successful lies.
I shot the shotgun into the floor of the dinghy.
I was drunk on many packets.
The orphaned oracle said, “the river is passion
that has learned.” How could I have known I’d be shot
out of cannons into a profession of cannon-crafting?
Life is strange,
and then you become food
for great, majestic, incredible
worms.
Other poems by Joseph Milford in ActionYes #2:
On the edge of the initiate’s fingernail lies the secret longitude, the lost Parallel
the somnambulist
Fossilized Roadmap
my first semester
a way of getting there
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