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poems by Rob Budde
manmade creek •••••
poems by rob budde wink books 2007 Prince George
copyright Š Rob Budde 2007 / 2010 manmade creek was printed in 10 & 11 pt Optima on Classic Laid text & cover stock Published by wink books. wink books 265 King Dr. Prince George BC V2M 5R1 rbudde@shaw.ca
manmade creek
manmade creek the gold itself bidding on semantics where the stocks are a wiki entry for small stream near wells bc where art swells from the water table the icon is stainless steel and repainted biannually the car stop stanza break is for a northern copy of a copy of false creek and its undoing an invasive poetics would be aimed not at reshaping but lack of vision what else might be said passes past the ditch and embraces what ceases to exist the deliberate culvert clogs springly and willows are an american icon made from an invader species the photo bidding on itself
neutrinos & semiotics a clean site, set deep the pure lines dotted with tell-tale bursts of love a deep site, a duration of darkness, granite-bound, an immobility sourcing the motion the poem site, set in bursts of movement, a stillness dotted with signs of something more
free radicals 2 the sources are certainty & fear but the outcome is regrowth--a market correction without exchange value complicity is breath sucking in the errant atoms’ socket in an artless mall kiosk and bad crack a by-product dumped in the love canal, the world the commodified word in the bloodstream is straining to break the code of invention
other poems in other places Could it be that it is quietude that goes on without you? A kind of surface tension or phthalates leeching from the water bottles and how-to manuals. The lab tests need a placebo control so why not poetry? Only afterward does a poem regret not addressing itself, wishes for a less congenial fit into some elegant window display. Transparency never is; a container that doesn’t. Only the language beyond the poets won’t betray them. New products are patented every day but shifts in semantic climate are rare. A poem dutifully voted but the referendum ballot lacked anything in the present tense and vexed mountain sheep tumbled from their folds. Now the poem nears carbon neutral and disrupts the midday classes with calm but guttural replies; a kind of homelessness not knowing where to start.
free radicals oxygen in the air interacts with molecules in atoms with an odd (lonely, unfulfilled) number of electrons this often occurs during childhood and it is clear that instability is a matter of support—who is around you highly reactive radicals create a chain reaction, like dominoes and then the trees fall faster and good old houses go and ethics leave cells may function poorly or die if this occurs and this general malaise is called progress but a defense system of antioxidants often identified by their distinctive colour and textures— the deep red of cherries and tomatoes; the yellow of corn, mangos, and saffron; and the blue-purple of blueberries and a good poem— these create resistance to the unstable atoms and this defense is called community in this context, oxygen in the air interacts freely, with a radical poetics, and cells maintain joy sustainably
re: packaging like an aura but a harder mold or mould, it still comes around to an essence-betraying motion called ‘the name’ if it’s in cellophane, it’s not worth it formulaic but habitual—a clammy hand cagey because it’s been a rip-off all along i wrestle with ambiguity—truth is non-recyclable, fast, & plays dirty the image shimmers, the fact shatters and the old poem is a coffin waiting for mourners, more memorials a metacognition—googling google and assessing the order are pandemic responses to media studies word counting when breaking the next line being unaware of the story telling you the unknown rolls over; the hill is me, over and over and the lyric trans fats are left on the shelf
prosthetica flesh/not flesh; air reaching for air, a closing in where skin does not stop, arcs into plastic, fingers entombed ergonomically, my eyes sunken into the dividing line we may have forgotten what true nakedness is under the paraphernalia of living—the streets teem with those draped in culture, technology like genetics modifying the body and how its habits break and how big can they breed it? teeth soldered full, cell phones hooked up to waves through cerebellum, make-up toxins sink like skinned knees and pacemakers wonder how it is we give each other anything religiously glasses crease temples and the soles of shoes leave the earth not here but hooked in and thinking is a blackberry out of juice
on petroleum, plastics, preservatives, and pharmaceuticals those ubiquitous stories of success and conquest: the beach, a quietude of sinking, cities drifting into a collective scholastic hum, harm harboured in the inorganic flood; words are mortal, more cancerous than poetry, more refined and they pull into sugary ponds of thought, populated or toxic the poisons a lexicon of canon; stasis is an etched cenotaph on newly unconscious skin, but the land goes on, its bizarres, its rites, its pogroms, its feeling a culture barely visible, the lens a word order caught in sunlight burning; bodies blown up and colonized, a silver-pilled flag staked into DNA; the mind is an orient, looking for itself in the wrong places; control