Sundowner
I woke up before the speed of light could
release me
and my thoughts were half asleep
music in my mind playing
the music stopped when I opened my eyes
and that peaceful moment between
sleep and reality
lent breath and I realized
I failed my dreams
a whole life was spent
running, frustrated
hiding behind the bushes
naked
the day was spent with friends
and family no longer alive
the day was spent climbing roof tops
landing on my feet
and flying
The day went down with the sun
unopened boxes of dreams were fading
while looking around I saw
the night trespassing
as the last rays of light were withering
like a fragile mortal
and I am trapped in a world
where small boats can't survive
the torment of a vast emotional ocean
where I no longer have lives to spare
no family all in one room laughing
no high peaks, acrobatics, cloud hopping
timeless cells tracing in and out
of a wild open territory
and of a tamed bound beast
to a horizon let down,
bereaved
Clburdett, 2015
Rewrite, 2023
A One Kind of Giver
Everything I write, a word bleeds
I wrought for a one kind of giver
Unending as a tumble weed sifting off drift
Never enough even when I re-stitch
I bleed each word as it leaves my mouth
Mothed by troth, the tongue
Commandeering
Giving dry air whips of snips of psssh
I reminisce its salience, its high division sign
No matter how much I give to it
I can't get enough, to give back
When I write I seethe
Iron draught with no green
Only wounding and scratching
I sought this as desire but desire
Made me question my form of propensity
Myself inside a blood shed drought
Blether and blather and who said rot-n-poetry?
My desert hand spasms at aqua vitae
Fraught by a quaff of birth
I cannot reproduce but a blush,
Easing a monochromatic ecstasy
Clburdett, 2024
The Man of War
He said I locked him in the car while I was inside the See’s candy pop-up store. Outside
watercolored oxen wheeled around me like the striking Triremes of Greece.
The Trojan Horse of voices bellowed,
Your problem is you lack ambition. He hitched his shoulders proudly. I looked up into the
rearview mirror. His Christmas present sat in the back.
I thought about the course of life and how apologetic I had to be. Speaking likenesses as a stenographer or a remote transcriber. I was the dead end to his research on the family tree. I wanted to kill the myth—and I did.
Unsewn patterns of fabric-keens. Un-strummed admissions from emissaries, a thinning ring with no proposal, a labyrinth of past tenses. My prematurely knotted fingers lightly untied themselves from the steering wheel. The problem was this. My uterus went hysterical and had to be removed.
No one was going to pull me out of Sparta, now.
As the colors outside swung by…everything sank into an overly painted sludge. I wished for Stein’s America where language and I were reintroduced as strangers. Of Loy’s manifesto fighting against the scorn of woman, and of Whitman’s unconscious yearnings for a dead father so he could finally sing of being unclothed.
Instead, I’m being compared like an orange against the meat and miscellaneous market. A captivus on the man of war. My next words were a hand to the horn.
…the pressure behind the horn gained and forged a history on every side of the sedan where olympian wings heaved the final edict.
The fall of Troy commenced at the flight of Zeus and not at the flight of Paris.
Clburdett, 2024
Karuna-luna
Solitarily matchless
A shadow-faced beast
Its own companion, unmarried
Moving as echo
A frequency hinged
On gravity
Grazed buoy
Solely decentered
Gunpowder ink
Un-calibrated vellum,
Dispossessed of
Memory
Helios-graveyard
Shape shifting lumen
Astral energies,
Dismantling irradiance
Reimagined myth:
Karuna-luna
Oceanic lei
The sole of the moon
Its sole on your life
Face ever forward,
Feet turned back
Orbiting Ciguapa
Iambic phoneme
A soft press, listening
To the base of one’s heart
Clburdett, 2024
Light Green
Deus Absconditus --“Book of Isaiah”
Should I presume the green night, light
From that long drag of smoke, uprising
Pale pealing and superimposing
Against backways, be so miserly?
Should I presume this to be your wake
Where your Latin, German, Greek, migrate
Komm naher, post mortem
To append a eulogy for you?
It was a cruel month
I was 13, wearing light green
Standing over your coffer
Hellgrün fading
Your face, crustulum
Your lipstick a bubblegum pink
Your chest a lapis cement, hard
You were wearing white with tiny
Purple daisies
Where the fog hugged you and
Climbed, I kneeled
I spoke komm zu naher fog, come near
Against my grief the sirens sang
I lied my head against the fog,
Wo bist du? Why, all this
Inaccessible light?
Yaya!
Hovering over your block like chest,
I inhaled
Eliot you were right
Longing
Laid
A wasteland
Wallace Stevens in the Bedroom
He talks of snowflakes
I listen, I imagine heat
He tells me
This is how you do it in bed,
Writing
And I think why?
Must man fight
To ensure this level of mastery
Sometimes writing inches along
It needs distance after the act
He’s got himself a way into snow
To craft his snow man
Each flurry unsentimental
An alumnus of poetic anatomy
Self knowledgeable, not contradictory
Turning to him I speak
How can we renegotiate?
This space, these sheets?
We don’t he says
But you just claimed
Vive l’imagerie!
Unlike non-aqueous-Stevens
Both pens sex
Both pens risk
Both contradict
This is how we do it in bed,
Writing
I get an ice-cold pfft,
Pure fantasy!
Then again, I unpack heat
An indissoluble heat
A hystérie misérable
Right in the middle of
Rearranging
The sheets
Clburdett, 2024 Revision
Comma Commodity
Hes got my back
Hes got my roof
He tooth fairy
With slippy noose
He lay the spec
To break the bar
Itching to perfect
The sacred bard
He got my comma
Commodity
He say he combat for me
He hold hiatus
Im commatose
He smash my trains
Mylettersstuck
He spare the dash
With my discord
No subsequent
No ancestor
He got my comma
Commodity
He say he orate for me
He don the dish
He don my deets
He down the bed
He slice the beefs
He peel the mark
Right off my face
It funny how
The comma braze
The tense is on
We separate
Our gin and tea
Our vag prostrate
With sword in hand
He troll the page
A muse himself
Omage the mage
He got my comma
Commodity
He top the mode
A la mode for me
Clburdett, 2024
Red-Fed
The bruised apples comb
Indelicately through the dark
Pine threads
Transit-ly, kinetically
Stimulating the formidable
Bole
The apples above do not want to plunge
Into the bristly baskets below
They want sunshine, to be
Sun-loved, sun-fed
Transported by wildflower
Breezes
The caramel apples roll
Through the magnetic caramel
Esoteric-ly, alchem-meticly
Deepening my
Insights
I remember when apples
Were red, red-fed
An infrared reciprocity
Radiating odes in
My mouth
Clburdett, 2024
The Return
A pastiche to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian
1.
The sins of the father
Fall back on creation
The sons of the father
Fall back on his word
The creator of sin is god
Man in god's image
True sinner is god
2.
Blood be the zenith of
Human capacity
Blood be the signifier of
What's red and unyielding
Blood be the line
Man draws on the living
We pay for god's sins,
We pay it, not god
3.
God on the coin
His hand on the ledger
The search for all meaning
Dead on return
The meridian thus kneels
On cosmic dissension
We are slaves in keeping
God's image immortal
Clburdett, 2021
Lesion/s
Alone in the mind it hurts
Patterns pressuring the eyes
Looking forward,
Sounds from
Other rooms
Mimic the voices
Of
people
who
talk
…she’s thorax
...exo-dimorphic
…traumata-anaphora
Gently moving toward
T h e
Corner
Head tilted, head/splitting
Not breathing, throat tic/ing
No one
Afraid to touch the w a l l s
The ground keeps the footsteps
Unintelligible
But the walls give way to betrayal
Segmented-alarm!
…she hears us
…we need her out
All talk breaks into a deep
S i g h/L a n c e
From the corridor
A chair
______wounds
The boards
Auras orphaned
Are lesions
Clburdett, 2024