Tag: prose poem

Modern Parenting Poem

Joseph M. GeraceLeave a comment

Cardinal feeding utility flag drummers and drunks oversimplify flesh the meat the spirit the soul everything i’ve learned about writing taught by drum and drink control yourself you will be free of mother nature calm down the copper knife at the back of your throat offers itself as relentlessness of the order that ought to chill a complicated relationship with beauty in the age of attention o gag reject to reject the reject who for so long you’d been looking for through the intended ai of the antediluvian injury and free now that you’re wise outside time as a broken window who beloved escapes the flipped hgtv home to lean on the car and drop its acid values and smoke through the stethoscope to the heartbeat of a hedgehog you’ve learned to love and keep close to your heart you are an awning now a father.

My Other Remix Oh Holy Tessera

Joseph M. GeraceLeave a comment

My other remix oh holy tessera to proclivities in decline like ever fluttering hearts who demand favors of long elbowed sanctuary as if anything were permanent but presumptuous dances and idiots who have plucked vertical suspenders from the eerie sandstorm suspending something echoing riots around ten oh seven pee em swims the first three epochs into perfect capsules of now parietal unscrewing suddenly the feeling mutual mutual suddenly unscrews feeling into perfection episodes swim ten echo something sandstorms each rubbing a timid bank of idiots dancing permanently on the scorched elbows of the tenements who heart ever fluttering proclivities do lean into adventures oh mix and oh my.

Ki Is Defined By Tu Fu

Joseph M. GeraceLeave a comment

Ki is defined by tu fu as envisioned by frank as a mountain of my final minutes on earth smiling at our ill fitting heads defined by merriam webster as the others’ ability to change its mind despite an international arms deal a definitive agreement on magnificent oil production closed door budget reconciliation between three ducks in a room where ducks died protecting the catholic race of feathers arrived proud as sizzling butter the air john not judged without first dance and eggs and the same for me once maeve finds her you’ll know she’ll know destiny autonomy the economy pinned up there on the cross in his crocs like a common butterfly disgust me me me most of all trying to become hard and in earnest for a moment cheekbones going null in blue light cheekbones i’m told mirror the grudge held about one or the others’ lack of feline perspective obey the past piling brown leaves by the side door training erasers for frank look down suddenly at the marvel villains wrapped in five hundred dollars worth of paisley the size o but were it less a factor of every stray suddenly kenning its worth in geranium ghosts and what you do with that once you see it floats down the river consciousness suddenly three petals.

Volcano is No Volcano [HOLD FOR APPLAUSE]

Joseph M. GeraceLeave a comment

A vicious life wrapped around symbols. What is the thing I want to tell you the reader is the same question as who am I as how do you want your daughter to remember you. A litany. As someone who taught her the courage to live as she wanted is the same as you as the clay won’t harden in such conditions is the same as grow. As the burning u-shaped chassis of the Volkswagen Jetta is to the tree. As hair-covered arms covered in ants. Develop love. Stick to it. What I know. Like white snow. Volcano is no volcano. The greater eyes retain you over man’s laws. And they’ve advanced to the point where you’re convinced you don’t remember the brand: Philip K. Dick. Nam June Paik. Open Mike Eagle. Donald Trump. Valentino Rossi. And more. On this week’s. Meet the Nation. [APPLAUSE] [HOLD FOR APPLAUSE] [HOLD APPLESAUCE FOR APPLAUSE] All art is taste. False. All taste is broke. False. The moment you call him divine. True. Red is blue / a wire monkey, / too. Remember that, Maeve? Syntax. In whose hand? Cheating. A projection. It’s sad the things you remember. My aunt’s hand. Why now? Wow. Disney laid hands. I’m afraid to reach out. Don’t be. Brown cow. And slowly cold rain in hair.

Dear Oblivion

Joseph M. GeraceLeave a comment
Main Street, Hackensack, June 2020

Prayer peels soul from body. Robin-eyed memory of never known. The scent of winter jasmine, he writes. I ascent, with neither knowledge nor trace experience. Mouth crawls with the acid taste of spider webs. Begging, really. Dear Oblivion, I continue asking the drain — conduit from, passive voice, channel away — to do the hard work. Three-fourteen a.m., a mournful eight-legged poet struggles to drag a stone amphora the size of a casket across the backyard — no vacancies.

‘Royalty’ by Arthur Rimbaud, trans. John Ashbery

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First published in 1886, Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations, the work of a poet who had abandoned poetry before the age of twenty-one, changed the language of poetry. Hallucinatory and feverishly hermetic, it is an acknowledged masterpiece of world literature, still unrivaled for its haunting blend of sensuous detail and otherworldly astonishment. In Ashbery's translation of this notoriously elusive text, the acclaimed poet and translator lends his inimitable voice to a venerated classic.
He died of cancer in a Marseilles hospital in 1891, still young — having in effect compressed what for others would have been a long lifetime of artistic revolution and exotic adventure into just 37 years.
Arthur Rimbaud was born in 1854 in Charleville, in the northeast of France close to the Belgian border, to a sour-tempered, repressively pious mother and a mostly absent soldier father who disappeared for good when Rimbaud was 6.

Royauté

Un beau matin, chez un peuple fort doux, un homme et une femme superbes criaient sur la place publique. «Mes amis, je veux qu’elle soit reine!» «Je veux être reine!» Elle riait et tremblait. Il parlait aux amis de révélation, d’épreuve terminée. Ils se pâmaient lun contre l’autre.

En effet ils furent rois toute toute une matinée où les tentures carminées se relevèrent sur les maisons, et toute l´après-midi, où ils sávancérent du côté des jardins de palmes.

Royalty

One fine morning, in the country of a very gentle people, a magnificent man and woman were shouting in the public square. “My friends, I want her to be queen!” “I want to be queen!” She was laughing and trembling. He spoke to their friends of revelation, of trials completed. They swooned against each other.

In fact they were regents for a whole morning as crimson hangings were raised against the houses, and for the whole afternoon, as they moved toward the groves of palm trees.

Source: Rimbaud, Arthur, and John Ashbery. Illuminations. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012, pp. 52-53.

One Hundred Uses For a Fern

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Wikipedia Poem, No. 780

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“A change in the concept of sexual identity is essential if we are not going to see the old political order reassert itself in every new revolution. … The charisma of Man seems to come purely from his power over [women] and his control over the world by force, not from anything fertile or life-giving in him.” Adrienne Rich, from “When We Dead Awaken”, 1971
ask before the hand privilege grant figurative praerogatin privilege grant comitia populi tributa with tribus cently with tribus cently a favor or privilege grant to stretch out the hand from privilege grant first in the roman comitia populi tributa from prae ask before voting to voters who by lot reg move in privilege grant figurativirus chosen who by lot voters rally a stretch out the roman comitia populi tributa noun use of 100 vote first from rogative use or election from lative 14c in praerogative use of 100 vote 14c in a favor late 14c in anglolative use of fern