Tony
Kitt
Weather Forecast
Dead warriors of the wind;
their eye sockets
full of typography...
They pocket hailstones
of denial. They spell Draco's New Law
with their bodies.
Death is the way to avoid
further punishment,
spurts the oversized voice.
Billboards; the weather forecast
for tyrants. The silky breeze
of invasion, the clouds
of zero doubt. The thirty-first tyrant
breathes a black candle in his bunker.
He's busy writing uninhabited poems.
First published in SurVision Magazine, Ireland.
In the Garden of Sounds
I kill you by naming you.
Because people are all breath.
If one speaks against autocrats,
his autobiography will be kept
in a cage.
Man is the sum of postures he
dreams up. Every vigilante
carries a weathervane.
Your mutation can be tried
in a juvenile court.
One who wields an edge
may get wedged. An ex-emperor
sings Blue Moon backwards
as he delivers his apostrophic empire
for a post mortem.
First published in SurVision Magazine, Ireland.
Down the Grete Stern's Well
Women are flying trees
wandering hands of the world
Crosses dream of becoming ladders
The weight of the moon is
too much for you
let's bleach our
biographical blotches
We giraffe through the continent
and take a trainsnake
to the eyes' coast
we fall into somebody's nostrils
and find our way onto a billboard
A spy in the sky
the self-evidence of cages
Hello this is your inner tiger speaking
without a mouth
How far can you go
if you carry non-being with you?
Cages break
into smaller cages
First published in SurVision Magazine, Ireland.
The Cornerstone of Tomorrow
Life you've been wading through, its
calligraphy... The boulders behind your back
practice the baby smile of footballers.
You collect church seashells, you invite
every dogsbody to your misbalance day – all this
plus the whisper of chrysalids will lead you
through this green parallelogram, the trapdoor of sleep,
to some "more often than not" place.
Thinking is a malady of our own interjection,
the stratagem of bewilderment.
Do you know all your "not-yets" yet?
We can see you, otherness, your eyes climbing
that cliff, following the path across abstraction.
The sea always sings goodbyes; the waves' mouths
gasp for phraseology. Tomorrow is a chanting megalith;
today, a building under destruction.
First published in SurVision Magazine, Ireland.
Violin
Poet inhabits a shagreen leather coffin.
Dressed in Vivaldi and strung together
with his hollowness, he yearns
for the warmth of the imaginable.
His body is staccato
suppressing legato; each breath,
a flageolet of defiance. Threads of the earth
originate in his shoulder.
Only the nameless dwell in the heart
of non-being. Poets unclaimed by any tribe
breathe their way through the void.
Autumn is in the rainwater of their eyes.
First published in SurVision Magazine, Ireland.
Metronome
In the vacuum of the moment, I accosted Prokofiev's metronome. The flute of a mute answered. Also, two walking billboards (after a brief consultation), both depicting Stalin, with an inscription saying "Elect one, get another free."
"Rhythm... you can find it everywhere, even in your breakfast statistics," the metronome finally ticked out. "It governs us communistically, and is rather crunchy. Taste it."
Prokofiev's octofingers were making music of survival, his eyes sparkling with mindquirks. The weather man was bathing inside his liquid baritone. Stalin's portrait waved to the frame it had left behind and occupied the sky.
First published in SurVision Magazine, Ireland.
The Invisible Cinema
A red-tinted movie
of my address book:
houses collapsing,
people going into exile,
dying.
To an outsider's eye,
some names,
digits.
First published in Shot Glass Journal, USA.
