Category: poetry

Automatic Vultures | hyperlinked poetry series | #6

ericryangrant
Vultures-poetry

Vultures-poetryopen your mouth to the stand of trees
automatic vultures tend to sneeze.
sonic or sickness, hums a creature first
where it matters, it matters most.

a nun escapes the passenger seat
her luck in a trunk at the covenant
a hero she gave up on for lent
bedsheets in sapphire, the room for rent

foreign geography with a touch of sobriety
lossless in an empty stall to call up
mirrors at an anxious length in a haul\
you carved out a tomb where
a winter went instead.

no one listens close in the city of god
dreams startle beans where green glass grows
in a fit without luck, the prayer picks a fist
in a knife fight with oblivion.

Dum V. V. | hyperlinked poetry series | #5

ericryangrant
While-we-live-let-us-live

While-we-live-let-us-live

What goes up
Must stay in sky. Dum v. v.

What ain’t ancient
Ain’t coming back. Dum v. v.

I howl Dum v. v.
From the back of my throat
Which is filled with malbec
Matched moonlight
And you say you can’t hear.
Dumb to see. Let us be.

What spills from the block of clouds
Are gifts we string to pearls.
Dum v. v. is a blessing
Of your sacred art.

I flop with dum v. v.
In ocean and salt sticks to hair
And you are sandside, waving in a black bathing suit
And the sun is a knuckle. We get drunk
And stay drunk
And get drunk again when we come down
And live where music never stops
This is Mexico and all else before anyway
It’s easy to say dum v. v.

I found my Ithaca to come back to every night
Excited and with barrels of wine, dum v. v.
And you dum v. v. late nights with you finish before they’re done
V.
Very
Merry
I’ve never had a bad time living hard.

What we miss don’t matter
What we build is the only standing thing
Dum vivimus
Vivamus.

Another, Then The Rest | hyperlinked poetry series | #4

ericryangrant
Brick-walls

Brick-wallsYou are gorgeous and I’m sadly ostracized from the table
at the moment. Intrigue and blue
Awnings, the ceilings we celebrate fade to night.

If the wind breaks, the crops they creak. They have no other feet.
If the sirens call, the dirt cannot to them speak
Back, cannot haunt the sleep
Of a farmer pushed to the bed’s brink.

Day one, something in you died. Where there is growth
A small angel takes things away.
Tell me the difference between an angel
And a ghost? One is active,
The other deliberate.

All walls bring terror; bring about nothing that eats
Sleeps, peaks.

I’ll have another unexpected catastrophe
Then the rest of the onslaught can carry me to a tune,
Away.

Counting Little Explosions | hyperlinked poetry series | #2

ericryangrant
Orpheus-Eurydice

Orpheus-EurydiceI come to
[from a coma break]
And you are up counting little explosions
[that broke my head back then].

All this mist
All this mutter
I won’t know the gifts you dreamed you gave me
[So half this heart
Has all the fun]

In the morning, you are still and I am crowbarring
[with the spare of my mentality]
Into the hot engine steam of your midnight expenditure.
Once in, I see
You tidying your nightfalls
[and my steam is molecular bounce]

Years later, when I think of this moment
I’ll say
The pain you woke to was not the urgent argument you contended.

You had not
Set up the crosses appropriately.
And that I could have stood another
Takedown of your raw twirl.
[that time you were my Orpheus, and I the suffering-to-be-saved Eurydice]

I should have
Never invited you in; though how would
I have a record of every little thing that breaks
And bursts, then.

Living On | hyperlinked poetry series | #1

ericryangrant
Long-road-ahead

Let’s keep living on advices we love. Wrap ourselves
In nothing cloths on summer evenings and lie about.

Let’s stay put
with grace. Or go on and on without punctuation
We’ll do the whole damn ceremony without it.
And forget prayer.

Let’s renew vows in a garbage dump—or fake a break up
Over the airport P.A. while they all break the other hearts
Delaying flights. Let’s cover ourselves head to toe
In honey, stick on the bandages bought that morning at market. Call up
Love’s captain to drop us off on a strange pier. Linger for a while.
Go back home where we’ve stitched dreams to streams
Of advice in letters across the floor.

And let’s throw in some bad apples too.
Disasters are the parades that remind me why I love you.

And have we already forgotten the too-drunken toasts to what we caught
And what we killed. And what we had but could not hold.
See I had all these plans and no gun to trigger the start. I had all this
Money and no tools to bury it.
All these seeds and
No pots to corrupt
That spectacular emergence.
Collars, but had no dogs. Chains, no commands.
Pride, but no patience.

I promised you the glories of life and came up short on what to do about it just
Yesterday.

So today I listen to advices, mostly from fabled folks
And they say to let love spoil as fast as possible—use it up,
Stomp on its throat,
Move on.

Well, I don’t know if I can do that. I’ve always preferred
the lovesongs you used up on me
To tragedy’s flirtation.

And even then I’m fresh out of my own ideas anyway.

Waxing [Poetically] Frank In Love

ericryangrant

Some nights you find yourself happening back upon the words of your favorite poet and it’s pure bliss.

This one to Vincent, from Frank. Notice the acrostic of it. “We’re all for the captured time of our being”–after all of that headlong movement like a train barreling on he comes to stillness; “captured time”. Ahhh, yes.

You are Gorgeous and I’m Coming

Vaguely I hear the purple roar of the torn-down Third Avenue El
it sways slightly but firmly like a hand or a gold-downed thigh
normally I don’t think of sounds as colored unless I’m feeling corrupt
concrete Rimbaud obscurity of emotion which is simple and very definite
even lasting, yes it may be that dark and purifying wave, the death of boredom
nearing the heights themselves may destroy you in the pure air
to be further complicated, confused, empty but refilling, exposed to light

With the past falling away as an acceleration of nerves thundering and shaking
aims its aggregating force like the Métro towards a realm of encircling travel
rending the sound of adventure and becoming ultimately local and intimate
repeating the phrases of an old romance which is constantly renewed by the
endless originality of human loss the air the stumbling quiet of breathing
newly the heavens’ stars all out we are all for the captured time of our being

 

Mohja Kahf’s ‘Copulation in English’

ericryangrant
Mohja-kahfs

Mohja-kahfsWe are going to dip English backward
by its Shakespearean tresses
arcing its spine like a crescent
We are going to rewrite English in Arabic
(Arabic script: how sweet, how sweet)

 

and all the languages of our blood
We are going to give English the makeover of its lifetime,
darkening the rims of its eyes with Hindi antimony,
making it blush Farsi roses
(Arabic script: the night, the night)

 

We are going to make English dizzy
until English vomits its history,
Norman, Saxon, Celtic, down
to its Druid dregs
We won’t stop playing with English
We are the new bullies in the schoolyard
and we like the merry-go-round of nouns and adjectives
and onomatopoetics and objective correlatives

 

We will bewilder English in Aramaic of Jesus
(Arabic script: My Lord, my lord, why have you forsaken me?)
We know its biblical heart better than it knows itself
and hold the blades of these lilies-of-the-valley
against its jugular vein

 

We are going to make English love us
And kiss us and explore us with its tongues
Then we will play hard-to-get
and English will have to phone
and leave a message after message of desire on our machines
English will have to learn what to say to please us:
(Arabic script: “I humbled myself until even me enemy wept for me.”)

 

English has never tasted anything this purple,
Seen mangos this bursting, trickling down its poems,
pomegranates spraying the tart red seeds
over its stories like white white linen
English has never smelled the cardamom this ecstatic
or breathed rhetoric this thick with love

 

English will come to us hoarse with passion
we will have taught English to have
and English will never be the same and will never regret us
Although, after this night of intense copulation,

we may slaughter English in its bed and redeem our honor,
even while pregnant with English’s bastard
(Arabic script: “Here comes the dawn upon us like a fire.”)

And On The Day After Christmas

ericryangrant

you see:
a heel fastened to a throat
a friend twisted inside out
the piano flirtations you wrote
postpone another cage you own.

a traditional kiss falls flat
with an ornament of prejudice.

last night, we slept with the bends
just a day after christmas
your syndrome maps another pointless atlas.

have you learned the horns of your disease?
the kisses that sink my submarines.
and what after that do you have to give?
the cry of a vacant embassy.

you spill another jack & coke.
the hospital prayers we broke
if i had the strength
id pull the curtains away
tell you
you only had one more day

maybe two more days
and anyway
the curtains stay.

April [8/15]

Now, New Year Things

ericryangrant

On the east coast,
we reconvene a drunken yesterday.
sighs sift the seaboard
snow flings unwanted decor on the pillared houses
we head to bed
before the world changes.

We’ve left the eviction notice up
the hate mail sits still in the yard
scattered.
We’ve chosen the next stage of life
before sleeping it off
and deciding again.
She says we can’t know the length of a river until we’ve reached the end.
Mightiness is heir apparent.

All else culls together tonight
— we believe in our cult or else
we wouldn’t be here —
even if it hangs in question.

We’re all set to be in love with the new year
whether it’s really new
or not.

April [7/15]