22.5.24

Three Poems by Mark DuCharme

Chat

1.
At day’s edges
The chatterers gather

For a lark, on a spree
As the zoom call stalls

At unstable spaces
Gifted with multiplexes

A common tongue
Mistaken for vocabulary

Whose ancient abrasions
Adhere

To footnotes & bombs—
An aviary of blasted Spanish

Mistaken for a gift demagoguery
Of the social banal

When you’d strum, surveilled
If looks could be palliative

As wind’s high, cool
Mirth—


2.
Don’t cross out the libation parade
Become interwoven with orchards—

Windblown
When everything else becomes rank

Like mired cameras—
Changing tune’s grasp of heaven

Necessary with peaches & alto
Suffering

In corners of a loss the wind
Accrues

In the cart no one reveals

 
Of Finches

Burnt magic
A dullard’s tongue
Sand & alembic
Pay truth to flame

The ruined voice of the goth quitting specialist
Pays truth to amber
In a national somewhere
That scuttles all the landmarks that you rarely even sing

If we are
Ourselves, as finches—
A likely outpour
As truth to flame in failed ghost presences—

Abetted breccia
Through which we often all are just stale news—
Be false, be favored
By nuance

Buy in, think twice
Listen to your lover’s advice
In quaint back rooms, where reason
Often feels
 
 
The Greengrocer Goes Nest Building
 
Those who imbricate calypsos
        Are not red
Except when assaulted by ukulele tuners,
    Lank ghost materialists.

Blink three times & tell me you’re nobody.
The wind is lost ghost material
Unlikely to become
                                A rumor, what am I?

Think, if possible, to avoid being anyone
        Sometimes, in reverse
Even if unhoused mourners lack
                        The thrill you must become.