Two Poems

The Candle Held for Mirth

Somewhere in the world there flutters a brief, nameless poem, perhaps an enjambed epigram or even a senryu.. of wishing to see, then being unable to erase from mind the sensed images— the data at odds with order, like cacophonous chords. The poem is hardly droll. Like its fellow infantrymen, it aims at rectifying the horror. –The horror.

In droves the horrors persist. And we take on the injustice. There may come a time for mirth, but it isn’t now; the jubilee may unroll over epochs, who can say?

The now is full with iniquities. With abuses and malfeasances, swift massacres, celled enslavements.

The now summons poet-seers to sheathe the discord, like a jagged trail through brokenness. To find a form that accommodates the mess, wrote Beckett, that is the task of the artist now. Then and now. Like oceanic latitude against staccato, the tumult remains, is natively entropic. –A scattered cyclone. A snake coiled high and adance. A fire hose loose and useless, a bane. But poets seize the hose, drape the blanket. Some words.. poems.. are not meant to be beautiful, but rather, disrupt chaos—form a tourniquet, disrupting disruption. I can’t unsee atrocity, but poets would rather see it than overlook it.

Then constrict it—smother it out, conclusively.

The form and the chaos remain separate, as it were.

Line designers, arriving at function.

Arriving in time to find and fix the faults, to address and dress the wounds.

Arriving at functional forgiveness.

Erotic Glimpse of the Unloved Mind Fleeing the Body

Never touched. Never grasped. The lingerie model virgin lies solitary at night under her veneer of thin underwear and imagines what love is or might feel like. She adores and abhors just how her closetfuls of underthings and hosiery and heels and jewelry and bags and untold further accessories including her cosmetics and extensions and plethoric fragrances feel, invariably make her feel both elite and chic and deified yet cheap and unloved, like a whore. If artists are, en masse, inconsolably excessive, effectively addicts, singularly or in hordes, she is, too, addicted less to the shutter’s click like a needle’s prick than to the tracking lenses, uninterrupted behind corneas, anterior chambers, and pupils, robotic, unshuttered, receiving an image at once a crude representation.. instantaneously transposed via axonal tract to new data, to synaptic and orgasmic bliss. So, exoticized, she deals. Until her sapiosexual libido dives to an uncanonized death in an unwatered pool and is reborn into a life of the terrifyingly explosive mind. Untouched, soon embraced. Never loved, awaiting love and understanding, grasping them.

Jonathan Bracker

Morning Events

I have pushed the Venetian blinds up So Henry can see everything out or down From the corner of this desk. Now he Looks out eagerly — or what would be Eagerly if he were human — apparently Considering that young man across the street Stepping down six steps with bicycle hoisted.

Henry then looks back at me looking at him, His whiskers a seal’s but not wet with sea-spray, His head a-move, ears occasionally dipping and twitching.

He now lifts and bends a paw to wholeheartedly lick it. Having gazed briefly but steadily Through the light material of a still-rolled-down Other blind, Henry arranges artistically his body and tail Before lowering himself to nap an unknown while.

It is something, how he teaches about nothing.

Jonathan Travelstead