13.6.26

Four Poems by Mark Young

Doodle #7569

 

Happenstance happens too fast

to ever stand up to investigation;

but still we welcome it, smile when

 

we fall upon it, smile even when it

falls upon us. Some remember &

go with their mother's advice — never

 

look a gift horse in the mouth. I tend

to prefer the pedantic Louis Pasteur —

chance favors the prepared mind.

 

 

telescopic nightmares

 

I am learning about how fish

disrupt sleep. Their imagery

tends to feel very real, inhab-

its cold, deep water, feeds on

other fish, possesses immense

power to affect one's life. Their

telescopes can capture evidence

of possible alien cities on Prox-

ima B. The strong suction cups

allow them to be attached to

larger predators & grab prey

in total darkness. At night they

prowl those large basalt plains

on the Moon that are called

seas because, from a distance,

that's exactly what they look like.

 

 

Another "Just So Story"

 

Left abandoned on the high

veldt, I notice how parts of

speech often do not hang to-

gether. Rather run their own

races — all the fullstops coal-

esced in a ball by a waterhole,

the commas top to tail in a

daisy chain that winds through

the grass & on up to the distant

hills. As for the conditional

clauses — well. . . Sometimes

words might stop to talk to

me, but because there is no co-

herence to their delivery they

are left lying on the ground

like scat, unheeded until some-

one like Rudyard Kipling sees

them & theorizes how leopards

might have come by their spots.

 

 

A line from Anna Akhmatova

 

The drummer & his quartet were

afraid to leave the environments they

knew, were also unaware of a certain

person held in detention. Add in the

 

small things overlooked each day,

those poems never read. & even when

they paid attention, they were care-

less. Micro-signals lose impact when

 

they're overly polished. Leave room

to drift, remember times when songs

were heard that brought back mem-

ories & think: she wanted storms.

4.6.26

Two Poems by John Sweet

i do not like anything anymore

and everyone here not dead
is dying,
and so what are we
still waiting for?

stick around as
long as you want, but the
future was never going
to be anyone’s
friend


portrait w/ still life, c. 1984

you and i like some frightened
child’s dream of blue skies

no words,
only images

the sleepy deaths of
summer afternoons on
burnt hill road

the inevitability of powerlines

you grow up and then you
move away and then
you stop believing in the idea of home and,
when you drown,
you do it quietly

you do it well

the trick here
is to pay attention

study the art of passive suicide

let the junkies dig their sad little graves,
let the priests be fattened for slaughter

zero is the
only number that matters

all kingdoms fall

never thought about this when
i was kissing you,
when i was undressing you, when the
spaces between us had disappeared

never considered mortality

never breathed in the poison
of government, of religion,
of false morality

was too busy laughing to
believe in those
next 30 years of unrelenting drought

15.5.26

Two Haiku by a.d.

haiku of the sundered childhood

autopodial ex-
hibition— atrocity
of the orphaned self


godmusings


When posed with the question, “What is the holy ghost?”,

her answer came without hesitation:

A state of mind.


a.d.