Sweet but unrelenting oranges within galactic but exploding kodiaks
I will make delectable pastries out of these heart attacks
MUSEUMS ARE EVERYWHERE!
Imagine the pixels on the billboards igniting;
Imagine them with wings;
Imagine them zooming through the air to you.
Wither with them or let them fling you into a plastic bubble.
Hues of pink spiral into hues of orange and it is blinding.
Only the brightest of yellows and the sharpest of blues survive!
Now they are swarming in and forming larger cubes.
Oh no! Now they are closing around you like a pair of slender hands!
Now they are fireworks turned inside out and you are trapped inside them!
It is a zoo in the sky,
and your elbows are awkward,
and your back is bent
and your knees are scrawny.
The skin on you is loose.
Come and see a man in an elephant suit!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Art found here
My friend made an acrostic for the word popcorn today. I felt I had to try my hand. (Hers was “Pieces of perfection condensed onto righteous nubs”)
And the Kieth Haring image is because pop art just seemed to fit with popcorn.
The Average Fourth Grader Is a Better Poet Than You (and Me Too)
Hannah Gamble, poetryfoundation.orgWhile in graduate school at the University of Houston, I supplemented my income by working as a writer in residence for Writers in the Schools (WITS). I was with WITS for three years, during which I visited third, fourth, and fifth grade classroom…
Do this!
Someone suck out the adolescent parts of my brain please so I can write like a fourth grader.
A switchblade of elephants is a chowder or a dead frog
I walk across the Milky Way with only this as my song
DRAW THE CURTAINS! THE PLAY IS ABOUT TO END
Think of the shuttered-face.
Unwindowlike in the most casual way
and breathing in the form of semicolons.
When I think of the shuttered-face,
I think of a fly on the very edge of a web in an attic
who, from his angle, can only see one point
of dusty light from the amber window;
his eyes make it into galaxies for him.
It is only beneath the skull
that desk lamps
are wormholes.
Think of the shuttered-face as an empty gazebo on a mountain or
Think of the shuttered-face as an old man’s beard in a wax museum or
Think of the shuttered-face not at all, swimming in your fishbowl
and admiring your golden scales in the reflections on the walls.
Branches are growing through the lines.
Ivy is turning bricks into gingerbread.
The arms of branches entangle in warfare!
Molasses pours through the streets!
Above the crown of the head, it is Armageddon
for the bonsais. The soil beneath the cracks in the skull is rich,
and the pink bonsai must flourish
and the yellow bonsai must flourish.
But the air above the crown of the head screams “NO!”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Art by Robert Ayton
SALIVATIONS
I do not concern myself
with the salivations of frogs
In an abandoned terrarium,
a tree grows
until it is thousands of feet taller
than any of the other trees on earth.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Art by Juan Bejar
3 UUTKU
a red toothache.
you can feel the dog bite
painted on a dime
——-
in mid-October
the traffic hums to itself
songs of fishermen
——-
a sloth yawns
puzzle boxes fragment
twisting into oats
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Art by Matthew Korbel-Bowers
(I am sorry to the people I am supposed to be collaborating with for not responding for a while…I will send you both a line tomorrow)
In regards to the poem from yesterday, I just wanted to say (and I'm sure it was not interpreted as such) it was in no way an attempt at a one uppance. You, Uut, and thetargetbird have been major forces in re-aligning my focus on writing (mostly through observations, sometimes projects) and I deeply appreciate the work, vision, projects, and contributions you're making to poetry and writing. I'm Will, nice to meet you. And thank you for the compliment about the piece.
No worries, I definitely didn’t see it as a one-uppance. I don’t think the concept of a one-uppance (as a negative thing anyways) can really even exist in an art form. I mean, creating the best work you can is always one of the goals of art in my opinion. I was actually really excited to see someone doing a project like that that I came up with, because it’s a great feeling to be a part of a great piece. So yeah, thanks!
BENEATH THE CANOPY
The Africanizations of manually operated theatre doormen:
Unwinding owllike, their Venus fly-trap arms catch jewels of light.
They will give them to you for a dime. They envy it’s roundness and its shine.
On a night when tambourines flirt with skylarks over the murky vistas
of the lungs, a night so clear that scorpions begin to crawl from their amber vases,
they will give them to you for a nickel.
It may be true that the wickedness of jungle frogs
is irreconcilable with the ways of man,
but viewed through the right telescope it refracts,
and becomes tapestry.
It is apparent the golden lion tamarins have been at their needles again,
pricking holes in the leaves so that the jungle life
is entrapped by their funnels.
For the first time in one hundred years, a honey smooth dawn
oozes over the horizon line.
For a century the horizon had been kept locked in a box
by the Quetzalcoatl children. Their smiles are fake though,
and the real sun wrenched away the tea-leave haze to reveal the impostor sun.
Magnolias sprout from the ears of vultures
and chatter in lost tongues;
the clouds are freed of rancidness
and happy bones are dancing in the golden age of sap.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
art by Julianna Swaney
TRANSMARINE
The balloon arrived carrying dogs,
whose skin was salt covered
who sat licking the salt from their own skin.
The captain, a Labrador, had dropped the wine skin into the ocean;
Inebriated dolphins circle and bob in the Atlantic.
In a red part of the Atlantic
In a Dionosysan Atlantic.
The dogs arrived thirsty and ill-tempered;
a Dalmatian howls wildly like a briar patch
A falcon flies, screaming, into the basket;
the beak of a falcon pierces the wicker.
The ballon dangles in a tree now.
It is a study in catastrophe.
The skeletons of dogs are posed as if laughing now.
It is also a study in catastrophe.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Art by Seymour Chwast
I’m A Broken Robotic Doll, Please Fix Me Pulcinella!
While working at the toy-shop, I invited a silent masked creature
named No-Face inside, believing him to be a customer. He wrote,
“Depending on the season, time of day, and other circumstances,
a particular direction might be bad luck for an individual,”
on a little pad of paper. Clearly confused, he pointed at my back
where a giant ratchet had appeared. “The use of such a conduit
may be entirely metaphoric or symbolic, or it may be earnestly
believed to be functional.” He intimated the latter, then vanished.
The defined practice of communicating with the dead
has no use here, we are not dead yet, just barely living.
The gears still click and whirr, but the rust has grown.
Have my voltage-gated ion channels changed? Dissolved? Calcified?
How does one know the amperes needed for action potential
in pyramidal neurons? I have known too much glutamate
to still be a child or child-like mechanism.
I remember, it was real.
L. E. Hollister’s criteria for establishing that a drug is hallucinogenic is that
in proportion to other effects, changes in thought, perception,
and mood should predominate; intellectual or memory impairment
should be minimal; stupor, narcosis, or excessive stimulation should
not be an integral effect; autonomic nervous system side effects should be
minimal;
and addictive craving should be absent.
But I want to be a real boy. I’ll even be apart of MKULTRA!!!
if Tom Wolfe will write a novel about my true human existence.
Our true human existence, astronauts of being.
Single combat champions,
clowns in Stravinsky’s ballet
dancing under a bell jar.
______________________________________
Art by Matt Walker - Wiki-Walk Project by zjoot
One problem of doing projects like this is that then people make stuff with it way better than you do. Or wait, not problem. The opposite of problem. Ok, it should say: “The beauty of doing projects like this is that then people make stuff with it way better than you do and it is awesome.”
