Features


Baker's Dozen


Michael Ives

 
   

excerpted from SOFT PERIMETER



the shape of the axe-head screamed bad omen
we've always been 30,000 years too late
means-testing a bionic sublime  
another high-pressure area parked over the plains
seeded with mosaics of thunder
one must drink the regional brew from a skull

*

drifter without history and his dog named Jet
lived in a box called it Vienna
render in pilgrimage the stuff of your meaning 
so as not to become a suitcase for commonsense 
that gunnery sergeant 
to whom a rape charge will not stick

*

like everything happening at once
as against events in a sequence 
we know the truth of one differently from the way we know the other
and trade away our lives on behalf of it
the way an islander trades away his daughter 
for a shiny metal object

*

but a few dark realizations wormed into the squelch 
can't mangle intelligence the way it used to
tells me we ought not desert religion quite yet
tie it to a post maybe and pummel it with stones and books
with stone books
with stones that were once books

*

the celestial city barking at anything that moves
turbid rivers flow from its omniscience
are the relics of the immortals still winking at me
or am I just moralizing the comedown / ? /
processed shark of its disavowals 
a door cut into the deity's movements 

*

whose inlaid stars of bone and mind
squeeze out any need of interposed space
itself means sky 
so do all doors that open 
not onto walls or precipices
but into a room pressed together by entering it

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some see a devil's profile in the storm track
others more high-priced kerosene
earth's children / dark compact masses buried in soil
squeeze a reef between matter and spirit
hope's a map with a moveable north
or this burning sensation of possessing eyes 

*

purls within the honey an ultraviolet milk 
little ice ages come on to the Venus of Willendorf and are rebuffed 
oak and wild horse give way to drained champagne flutes 
turning tricks with light for pin money 
the solace hidden in the crisis 
purrs below audible range

*

three dead senators / two garden salads / one house boy
the internal illogic of society limits field purity
no one knows where the real basement is
hence suckling at the male breast of the dominator
electrodes on Diogenes proved nothing
relinquish me to the suggestion box

*

where microchips and air books blithering 
toward the anaesthetized tiger of indifference 
usher us closer to that great fecal dream 
abhorréd opposite of our conscious desires
franchyse landscape burning bright 
in the mercury vapor of the night

*

one more lost probe
NASA  / put the onus on / a wobbling pivot inside a gyroscope 
at / not in / the notional New Jersey  
me 'n Spats on his Lyman quarterbacking the whole mess 
in nineteen hundred and colonoscopy
no one never factors in the human dimension

*

while drought 
cancels out the absence of a divine face  
or else powerful orifices must open up in the land
ripe and electric
with a proof of having navigated through
to the center of the corn's rage

*

burned along the seed's interior walls 
waiting the night long for a father to come
believe with me the dusk that saddens you will collapse 
and I was free 
to release the freedom to its prison
who wants as badly to gambol

*

in America we have a saying
but it's all silted up
have you seen me / ? /
mind-state dating from the glorious period of unities / ? /
please call the following number after 5 PM
at the following number

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of deepest space / its faceless nature
accounts of it can't tranquilize the core enigma / quite
otherwise it'd ruin the atoms
hysterical martyrs to this shimmering mood piece
we're not quote unquote designed to wake up 
out of anything

*

as a colloid dispersed among fluctuating nets
consciousness always eludes the dicks from the Agency
baroque washes of twilight bathe its surface 
in pavilions of vibrating stillness 
life grows out of flaws in the program
anyway / hi / I'm Courtney / your 3D busty introject

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