Mark Lamoureux's Blog, page 3

NaPoWriMo Day 11

SILVERBLACK

Spring’s a dream of the world,
which is death—frail membranes
shot out of wood & dirt.
Then thunder.
Silverblack sheets whip over stirring
streets & trouble cherry buds,
who hold fast to branches,
for dear life, for a short while.

Dear Life,
What are you wearing?
Out in the rain, under the ground,
lousy with bugs & bones—
the city falling apart, as it is
wont to do, over centuries,
towers raised & begin
to fall. 55th & Broadway,
the same old pizza guys,
even in dark of night, in storm;
this one’s hair has gotten long;
we are all rushing
toward oblivion.

NaPoWriMo Day 10

EVERYBODY’S GOTTA LIVE
after Arthur Lee, for M.T.

Hold my hands
in front of my face;
there’s a man with a gun
between each finger.

My body in the mirror
a pale ugly fruit;
the button on the oven
says STOP TIME
but when I press it
nothing happens.

The elegance of the hydrogen molecule,
a cup & saucer
at the end of the universe.
This solar system
just a mote in someone’s far out
tear, a witch’s nipple
that dims the sky;
my pretties,
that’s close enough.

Enough for a last ditch
day-glo attempt,
fifty million their heads
sinking below
the waterline, hair streaming
over them like the winter
limbs of a bad old elm:
Officer, that man
will not stop dying.

A centipede jitterbugging
on the roof of hell,
eating the flowers,
casting a long shadow
on the black & red daffodils;
a quilt of malice
& regret. Regret
for what was, but
mostly regret
for what wasn’t.
Desire the only
philosophy.
A skull
in a fistful of grapes.
Put on your dancing shoes
& never go home.

NaPoWriMo Day 9

ODE TO A BROWN BAT WHO BRIEFLY VISITED MY OFFICE

Hello
attic bat
circling so briefly
like a premonition
of spring snow,
poured through
a keyhole, knowing
nothing
of personal property,
all the college town’s
eaves a vast dormitory
for furry brown students
of shadows.
Church-mouse
with devil wings,
who sings
to find the door, sings for
supper, supper
hears nothing, suspects
nothing, is snapped
up by a jittery blur.
Who angles at baseballs
chucked above
suburban oaks, tangling
in the bronze curls
of girls who hate you
for the simple sin
of being born.
Albatross of All Hallows, brother
all your dreams
are upside down.

NaPoWriMo Day 8

CANCION DEL FUEGO FATUO

Vora la mar de Lusitània un dia
Los gegantins turons d’Andalusia
Miles Davis sketches Spain via
30th & 2nd. La pimenton de la verra,

Will of the Wisp bops along,
a karaoke blip in massive April;
Margaret Thatcher’s dead;
the dead go in the ground

with the flower-bulbs, only one
comes up gladioli. The relentlessness
of Spring baits godheads,
cloudless sky a special blue plate.

Trumpet’s oppositional defiance regales
tender shoots shot up among sidewalk spoils.

NaPoWriMo Day 7

SUMMERHENGE

The seminal sun
ignites the trilothons
of huge sleep, five mouths
for the other place:
death of summer,
death of autumn,
death of spring,
death of winter & the death
of the undying
at the beginning-point
of the circle. Among her
grandfathers’ stones,
down the old ground road
of the lusting ice
as no man may go.
Flowers’ heads hang low
among the heavy barley
in the time of the green
wood, moist & bright
& breathing in hand
in the quivering field, the road
to the river is long now
like the summer day &
the birth-road short, the spear
of fire parts the plinths
& stone bleeds
to wood, warm like
a breathing thing, blurry on the ancient
path while the men suck the bones
of venison beside the bare trunks,
the flowers of the young
are spit from the bowers
of the dead. The eyes of the river
watch, the speaking river
who bridges
without two ends, like the line
of the sunroad, swoop
of a stone axe, that what cuts
or burbles. The washing
of the water that brings
the seeds to life & the fruit
to death, fire sinking
into the land itself, the twisting
waters quick with the wide eyes
of summer stars.

NaPoWriMo Day 6

MAJOR MALARKEY

Dogspeed in the horse
dream, claptrap
of hooves & sprightly
air. Down the dirt
line like a dart, air
in your gift-mouth
like a bit for Trismegistos,
ridden by Black
Madonna, full up
with pearls for pigs
& Trojans. Say you are
chased by the illest
wind, jumping like Jack
over the steeple so high.
We all want one thing,
the same thing as
everyone else. Everybody
runs: for office, for
an orifice, for dirty money
& clean clothes, like tears
or the stocking itself,
wedding garters
on the money. The gun’s
cracked now go
go go.

NaPoWriMo Day 5

MOCKING BIRD

Sachem water star
pissed rain fiver
slaked heirlooms in the
hollow loom
Blasted-out highway cliff sun
regulator watts
traipse roughshod over
trellises, delicacies’
territory fugue horizon
line

Stables weather is ah of this
Spirits pressed together
Like Lego bricks to form the jamb
Of the door door door

Taxing waning
Take breeze unto
sightlines boneless
harp harangue in the tousled
branches bamboo

Taken space
bride equivocally was, gosh,
wapses in their hiveses
lake spurs detritus where
ruffians, cables, rubles
like another mic for calisthenics
prism

NaPoWriMo Day 4

TREPANATION

First will emerge
the imps of shame,
walking clots of dark
muscle that will turn
to mewling, pleading things
in the earthly air.

Then gouts of tears
from the watershed
betrothed to us all,
in the relentless beams
of the sun the rainbows
that will play around you
will have an eighth color,
not from outer space
but the inner crazy
aquifers of doubt.
The unreasonable animals
that will come to drink
from the resulting pools
are not to be trusted.

& then the very owl
of Athena, whom we believed
to be so rare, pinions
slicing the ordinary air,
will alight on a powerline,
incredulous she is there at all;
goddamn—you have no idea.
No, really, she flew off with them all.

The comes the infernal piping,
a single note
through the aperture,
it is the bean sidhe’s shriek,
but don’t be afraid, she’s
out of context here—
your hairdresser
in the cross-town bus—
beware beware beware
beware beware, etc.
Are you finished now?
Good.

At last there’s only a creepy
drain-gurgle, a last squirt
of television static, a few earworms,
goodbye Fernando,
& then nothing but a dull,
wholesome ache.
Well, what did you expect?

It should come as no surprise
that these effects are only temporary;
any idiot, after all, can drill a hole
in their skull. The sublime transformation
of death is reserved for death. Duh.

Look on the bright side,
now you’ll always have a spot
to store a cork.

NaPoWriMo Day 3

DON’T GO LOOKING FOR THE MOTHER OF MONSTERS ON THE INTERNET

She led him down
there to where
the boy could be sad forever
in the forgotten metro
stop that has waited
since the city was born,
like an appendix,
the woman with the leech
tattoos; she said every letter
of her name would visit
him in the night
to steal his bones,
alphabet of thieves,
cant of the names
of the babies born
without them, who swirl
into the drain, oxidized
wine, gurgling & dripping
from the broken-necked
wind-up flowers.
The streetlights hung their heads,
the nerves pumping
under their nouveau iron skins.
She wrapped him
in a shroud of tongues
of quick cats who landed
all wrong, there among
the cans of candied squid;
the little lemur men
rose up from their cysts
& bore him
through the germanium gates
into the deathless squeeze
of a book with only one page.

NaPoWriMo: Day 2

POLYBIUS

The console heart is dark glass
of the undersea
trench stars; comes at you
with the fire
of the wrecked square.

A biomorphic capsule playing
among the tines
of the eleven-pointed star
of the amnesia queen, her
purple lips quivering
like the trains of the black
swallowtails that rise up
from the pit
as broken promises.

Mind the sawed-off limbs
of the interrogator
whose seven hands come
to harvest your information
& twist it
into a dreadful little doll.

Your compass fairy
is suspended above
the grave of vectors,
while it bleeds code—
diabolic code
to be hung on the arbor
of the matricides, grey
bland moss that will squeeze you
into a dry lemon.

Play alone,
or blame yourself
for what happens after
in the bright
night
of the soft arcade.