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
Del Fruita
Atop of limbs it spits
Atop there is no king
No fear of papas y mamas
Of sway of sueños
No el temor de dios
No fear of dream
Ripening hard as it sits
It drips
Del triste
La fruita is la cima
The top is la creama
The nobility the loft
The U bend the trough
A Hangman's juice
It weeps
Melancholia is the disease
The top is where they belly up
They soften with lividity
That heavy juice loot
Of rotting fruit
Weighs down on
Unspoilt
Extremities
The top is where they
Zombify
El pecador es the
pecking order
De devourer of men
Suco blood
It runs aquí,
Ahora
Ay low low siento
Ay low low siento
The collapse of all
Kingdoms
Don't fall
But
Drip
Making those at
The bottom
Bow
Clburdett, 2024
Enhoused
Some say all the smiling rows are houses
Are women en-housed
As the man-cars drive off to work
Moving down the line to Dos Passos
Drinking from the asparagus fountain
Of Stein
This turbulence was House
Filled with dampened and embittered Marys
All wedged between filth and dust
Enclosed around eras of postpartum
And nudes making optical waves down
Staircases
Her hatred within was In-housed
She hid bellies like Picasso
Hiding eyes behind ears and
Up into foreheads
Lips eclipsing lips
Covering noses
And housewares were far from mutton
Embossed on each gable end read:
Home is the roost that boosts
Her two daughters lived there
One kept killing off bodies
Even the one growing in her
The other was daunted by
Objects embodying bodies
She could not fill the house
Some say man put woman
Inside
Some say man bought woman
To feed the House
Some say woman sold out
Under herself, to resent
Herself
Her body the difference that’s spreading
As the cars drive off to lost Passos
Man wants to be inhoused
To be Womb to be woman
Now he wants her out
Of His house in which she was En-housed
His line pulled a side-skirt, de-routed
Keeping the parts of all her selves
As himselves
Gable end reads: Outhouse
The parallel pirouetted back
Into a set of smiling rows
Enslaved
Entombed
Clburdett, 2022
Writer’s Crucifixion
I do not come before Homer
I come after
I can make the words resemble
Him or make the words
Echo, tom sawyer
In the funeral rafters
I ghosted Homer
I tried to paint
I tried to orient myself
Without the taint
He gave spots like a
Shakespearean murder
He gave nails like a roadside
Crucifixion
Gave sailboats like he was
Running out of epics
Claimed illiterate to avoid
The nastiness of writing ethics
Who put the nail in first
Who invented flattery
We argue
Who is the copy
I borrow from Homer
His ghost agrees
I come after him every time,
Every time I write
His dorian gray
Tells me
I plagiarize
Clburdett, 2023
Patanam-Script (Flying Down)
I was
Here
Navel
Here
Flying
Alpha-sporadically
Aero-degradingly
Pa-TRAM annulmen-atingly
Down
Square up-un-rootingly
Sand surf-obeisant-ly
Non un-in-here-rant-ly
Down
Detox
&
Rest
Lotta rungs
[Insert]
[foot]
[skip]
[hand]
[foot]
[hand]
[foot]
[slip]
Press
Into
LIN
GUA
This
My
Space
No (is)(are) reverb (((echo)))(((ing)))
Space
No (ex)(pect)(tation)
Affixing
Space
A
L
O
T
T
A
R
U
N
G
S
To
One last word
KA!
ka
Ka!
KA ka ka ka
Ka
Any word
As
I
Fall
Off
Clburdett, 2024