Poems

1980


Safe

among the things
that whirr & blink,

a funhouse cloud of pips,
LED red, the rasping

sob of ROM the spaceknight, the
clatter of moving parts, sweat

blobs of solder adjoining game
green silicon swathes— enormous,
dumb. Read:

“only memory.” Crunching

roof ice drools from the ceiling
into the
puke bucket as

low arcs of snow blow from the blower,
plugs of flesh
from the wings
of disintegrating angels,
strike & rattle picture
window like tiny thudding birds:

father brown suit, lost faces
on the evening news say this

retreats so quickly in a decade
I was made & unmade, a sprite

in the icehalls of ego

bendy-armed Mr.
Fantastic.

Snow
pig melts into Swine
Flu anathema,

pinned down on rubber
gym floor: war is private,
familial. Hatches

batten for 12 years of
cowboys lasers synthesized
egos en croute

while meanwhile the barren eggshell
is ticking, the brave bird is molting

to fly over K-Mart,
not a dove
not even an eagle but a Roc

with an ear for a brain.

TRACTOR PATH

My lost ones, remember
we looked out on a drab zone
only. Malice blessed the cloth
that unraveled; let it not be said
I left you alone there or

I had not already begun disappearing

even then with the woollybears &
giant toads you killed.

Basketballs / Planetfalls / A cropless lawn jockey
who squinted at the dim road/ wan
raspberries impaled messy & tart
on their own thorns.

So many earnest fisticuffs; my love
is less earnest but travels farther,

is a shadow that pours across your feet.

My ghosts, I never
stole the air from your throats or made you
disdain that which I am, or was,
or will be.

You rode out further on the bicycles
when my legs buckled, way back here

where I have made my home & am slow
to go out & still we fight as over
some invisible Gaza—without bombs
or voices. These are the years
that pile on & siphon off: you will admit I was
never Janus-faced, or even sentient
in those grey, blown-out copses that hid
our lacks.

I went alone because there was no map,
nothing to reach for & nothing to return to.
You know that

amnesia is all
I ever wanted, to cut free, to be with horses &
women in the shadows or on a street with no name
at all.

Still I send you
a packet of all that
never transpired.
This is my castle on the hill,
this is my beautiful demiurge, my hoard
of spent shells & offal, in the awful

basement where we cast our lots
with the long-legged spiders, forgotten trowels,

the skeletal farm equipment on the spot
where we were made & undone &
made & undone under a canopy
of rooks, no-one

told us they were rooks & no-one sewed me to you,
my lost little men,
down by the brook or huddled in the brokedown cab
where we are, still & I still
have little more to say to you.

ADJUNCT

He felt as though
it would come to them
like a demon across
the steel-colored surface
of the water—nigh
insubstantial as if outlined
by punctuation marks &

it would be as a blight
or a fever upon them,
at the behest of a pointed finger:

as at Adam
as at an imagined target, BLAM!,

a wreath of salamanders
around the sacred
head, egg-cup hourglass
of the sticky walnut
of the brain.

He found them,
drained, though, already

unstrung as if listening
to far off music with no

human melody,
or at least any

human thing he could recognize:
a corn-husk fetish,
an ingot-eyed mask—

No, it was as though
the text were already
scrawled & lobbed back,
a ticking shuttlecock,
at the authors, landing
as a cocoon of papercuts.

Back to Square
One, already immersed
in magma, sanding
the scratches off the
diamond leaves of
the first ever tome.

THE KIDS AREN’T ALRIGHT

The tribe of anguish
speaks
as a glyph on a gold nymph
or chalky caligrammes on the dark corners
of the underground;

valises bespangled & festooned
with skulls of flowers, skulls
everywhere, heaped
like coal, everywhere
cavernous balless eyes
wink with the color
of no jewel.

The end of the world:

it’s alright it’s alright it’s alright

I hollow, but
like a drum—years accordion
in the juke box, flipping back
toward ice cream 1970—

epoch lost inside a conch
shell, the dream inside
the crane game, the sorceror
produces a plastic egg
inside which inswitches
hierarchy, the
beetles climb the wall in
a formation of a human shadow,

an elided ‘ng’
will signal the end, a trumpet blast

all will fall
onto the bristly false

grass—they were the wind of
prophecy—
down the telescope tube
toward the eye, spinning
like a coin on the nose
of a giant carp.

Mark Lamoureux lives in Astoria, NY. His first full-length collection, Astrometry Orgonon, was published by BlazeVOX books in 2008. He is the author of 5 chapbooks: Poem Stripped of Artifice (winner of the New School 2007 Chapbooks Contest), Traceland, 29 Cheeseburgers, Film Poems and City/Temple. His work has been published in print and online in Fence, Mustachioed, miPoesias, Jubilat, Denver Quarterly, Conduit, Lungfull!, Carve Poems, Coconut, GutCult and many others. In 2006, he started Cy Gist Press, a micropress focusing on ekphrastic poetry. He is Reviews Editor for Boog City, a Manhattan-based literary paper, and teaches composition in the CUNY system.