lapse

I am all written and every word is a scrawl

and when black as birds are there are still grips

and canvases without a single stroke of flight or

feather and when too many conjunctions creep 

together to glue down a page and crack and

crop and corrupt and and 

and watching, watcher, is not the creeptone 

trembling far enough?  Are not the many

miles crawling with wires and coiled about

cold feet formula enough? And when 

sleeping on evening air heavy with

cold stars and breezed over with

cannon sounds from indiantown gap,

 is there anything

left to look at?

Hum, for lack of a song

Industrial Nomad - the shiver-shinned gypsy bluster-blown through smokestacks and red brick ruins, blackened

A cast of one.  On another inroad, another shift of frame and through a heavy sky crashes, red-waddled, the rooster god.

As it is industry, the rooster god is headless and spouts in great ash flecked fountains the arterial blood that once powered its tiny seat of omniscience.  In the sea of blood one might find some sign of sentience, some indication that the powerful heart of the titanic fowl sprays its contents with purpose and divine ingenuity for now the scene is painted red as a fur coat and draping its drippings as if curtains spread from stack to stack and all about the soot has fallen flat and been pulled from the air and the industrial nomad who, for lack of better occupation, begins to clean the side stacks with a lone mop and bucket, or perhaps a toothbrush, or perhaps a zamboni.  Unlikely though it is, she soon has clotted all great gouts and in rusted piles stacked each platlette patty for the vultures of midday and morning-after to take up until, like a "turned" hotel room, all that is left is the uninhabited hollows of all these artifacts strewn about

Revision Results

Well, for better or worse there wasn't much I was able to change and rearrange from my musings last night. Perhaps I'm just out of practice doing self-critiques and revisions, or maybe the poem is just getting towards completion. Here's where I am now. I have to let it sit a few days and come back before I decide whether the changes are for the best. For now the poem both is and is not each version. Quantum Poetry! ... sigh.

Out of step with nature
couples blush and cuddle in early spring
- branches are budding, birds birthing

and in fall they bar themselves in
against winter snow

- the trees, comely, blush
and flirting expose their
slender limbs

I once caught two trees kissing
as I looked out my frosted window
listening to autumn winds

- she (blushing red) leaned
in to him, they intertwined
his thick trunk holding him
upright against her

when morning came I noted
- she still bent a bit his way
a lonely branching caught
in his wicker fingers

Live Editing

So, I'm fed up with not having any readership, and also with not making any entries. In order to alleviate these two (potentially related) problems I'm starting a live editing process. Every day, I'm going to get on here, and work on a poem or short story from my wikispace. I'll be making comments about it and talk a little about my creative process. Additionally, when I finish a book or some such I'll write a brief summary of my thoughts about it. I guess this is going to make this blog into a log of my literary travels, a sort of benchmarking of my thoughts and feelings on the way. Travel Signs. So that makes sense. Anyway, next post should be a live edit.