Abstract poetics

I did a free write today and came up with five short and untitled poems. I was thinking about how much I needed to write at one point in my life and about how much I could benefit from getting back into the mode...


A thick layer of gridded celophayne
superimposed over my will
preserves only the outline
of the incisions
as it lie in refrigerated box cars
that have yet begun to move.

Plucking each word like an unwanted body hair
Painfully from the layers that tell others who we’ve learned
to be above quick glances that guild the silence
in unmistakable shades of anticipation and waxburn.

All that I have learned
in grotesque bouts of surrender
infringes on my ample solitude.
As if I had not given away enough
to see where the bottom was sure to take us
before we began.
I decided those days
in the sun-filtered library windows
that we were able to do no less
than we imagined.
And for that price we shall continue
only as half-faded relics
amidst an ever evolving history.

In the flickering of our faces we carry
hunched and buckled, hard-bellied
the staunchly stubborn postures we have taken,
molded our bodies over the wired mesh
that takes shape only in retrospective moments
endured against the contortion laden landscapes
whose familiarity summoned
the tragic attraction of our childhood…

Pacing ourselves,
The circles grow redundant
As if we didn’t know where
these lines were heading
long before we drew them.
Instead, we poke at spaces between
the grandules, displacing the children who
play too long in the sand dunes.