Five Poems

AIN’T NO SOUL

(In these old shoes.)
First fish, what stacks up under
the false flesh. Chitin-sheen,
lackluster images
in the green hills. To live is
wasting time. Those roads
so austere. Curls inside
the blizzard, the priapism under
the formal gaze of space.
Woodwind shriek, unto the small
hours, not so taxing here as is
the sheen of sweat. Sage burned
inside the pub. Running out
the glyphs on a deck of cards.
Errant beehives, murmur of brooks,
a murmuration on the roof.
Buoyant in its latency, the ever-
after. The noisy television smog
of the transition lit no haunches
this time. Not like the green apple &
that long lost sheen in July, the sheen
on the couch, burnt out and gone
from the sheets of film. This light
through the plastic will not be
seen again, not in the pub, not in
the club. Sage, who were you
anyway?

INTERPLAY

A white sequin, a frosted
              plastic cup that cracks
like bones.

              Ruby red rings,
wick prone in a thought-balloon
              of wax.

What remains,
              at the end of the day,
the end of the road.

              Harpsichord tunnels
a tunnel of waves,
              into the realm

of hammocks & Twinkies;
              a rift in the wire
screen the sign of the

              eternal concubine,
as though anything could be
              star-crossed,

colliding stars explode
              like God,
some say at the edges of

              the runway,
so many deep causations;
              no time to explore—

recurrent recombinant,
              a scene played
again & again:

              dancing?
Or perhaps making bank.
              On the banks of

which river? A river
              that runs
underground, black

              like the sky &
just as fast.
 

HOLD ON

                No Jupiter
mission.  What of all
                that
Futurist blood?  Dynamo
                nothing
but a hairy magnet.  It is
                the same river,
again, it begins
                to fall apart.  Soon
enough these fins
                look dated, the date
always later than you think
                it is.  Eventually
a torch becomes a club, cargo
                yields ephemera—
the sounds of others, the streets
                there brimming
                with alien fruit;
what happens if the utopia
                happened & we never
knew?  It didn’t look like
                we thought it would,
naked, trembling in the bad
                heat of the flat, the flat,
flat world after all.  It spins,
                the flat platter of the world,
the needle sings:
                to you
to me, utopia the span
                of four little hands.
For an evening, for a second,
                for a lark.  This, after
all, was what we wanted—
                to make our choices
but not have to choose.

DON’T LEAVE POOR ME

Advancing blacktop, always
               at the behest of
shrinking leaves, the last
of whatever came
               before-- what falls
chaos white & pink of flowering
trees, scattered
wounds puckered on rock
turf.        Don’t green to
grey, sail away the ripples
toward shore, banking waves
a klaxon.  Always vectored
continuity, a pointing arrow a sword
                like macaroni overhead
that points at sag & fall,
                gelatinous jowl
of tentacles.  To lord
                over just groans. Who once
struck the silver gong
                 for me                   now going
habitual into
                 abyss mists         Miss so-&-sos
who were                the greyscale
                 actresses
now dust.
 

OLD LOVE NEVER DIES
 

Red silver windup chrome dome
or in Bespin

fatigues; Corgi look-
book.  What is spelled out

by nixie tubes. Glass face
of the Humanoid.  Hinged

waist & no legs like
a plastic bell or polyp.

Revenant in velour,
at the door the life-

recall fixates on booty;
foam-rubber Viper shot

headlong into a dirty wall.
Wild-eyed Norn screamed up,

crimson lightning in her eyes.
The lost continent of Mu.

Voices on the phone.
A shotgun a shotgun a shotgun

family vacations.
Ambrosia, called up from the dust

of never was.  A smile, a forded
river, frozen Lethe ice pop—Lotus-

eater dumb in the back
of the Aerostar.

Mark Lamoureux lives in Astoria, NY.  He is the author of two collections of poetry Spectre (Black Radish Books 2010) and Astrometry Orgonon (BlazeVOX Books 2008).. 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.