Mark DuCharme, Beefheart’s Sugar, et al.

Yclept faux

image by Irene Koronas 

Beefheart’s Sugar
 
            i.
Raw, assimilar shoptalk
Indigent asymmetries
Or some kind of indignant memo
When summers were bland dictionary silos
Profane like silence
A roseate infrastructure of pigeons
Some of whom went crazy
In a spectacular folly
Of gateway profanity
Disavowed as what I cherish
When great tanning is through
 
            ii.
Everything is someone
You aren’t anywhere
Where is anyone who is?
 
Who is someone always?
Why aren’t you there?
In a cruel motion
Where the sun won’t cling
 
            iii.
Yclept faux stocking alerts
Hills or threnodies?
 
In the innate red mirror of Stockholm apologies
Some sort of ignescent tablature
 
A book that tries to be everything
& In that process, becomes itself
 
 
Poem
 
You, bright impostor
        Roll with the shimmers
                Find your dream yurt
 
Flicking miniatures
        Tidy barricades
                Flaying dodos
 
Flood the ice rink with
        Layaway malice
                Four hundred thousand new missed calls
 
Something to glimpse at the eddies
        A practiced silhouette
                In search of drone funding
 
With such a firm hold on us that
        Canal sex couldn’t be better
                Even after space invaders shrug
 
 
Corrective Housesitting
 
The contént were dressed in tupperware shelving
A grimace of fishhooks
Reversible mirrors
Lips like red blotted plaster
 
All birds are clouded ivy. The buttermilk ghouls
Trembled with lockdown futility. All was fuzzy
Peace through the scenes
Of amethyst dolls. Taut lemon cargo
 
A smoldering of rattlesnakes lay low on the
Verandah. June was frumpy with sheet metal
As if all the weather were a snob
That the wind might heal, in the strangeness of dullards’ eyes
 
 
This Garden Futility
 
Slump echoes evenly
Evasive by plunder
On a cartoon shore
Tender egress
 
Collapsed housing vagrancy
Is or intentional
This procedure says so
That you wanted to set free
 
Within seeds or an echo
Of nuzzled oleander
Plummeting    faintly real
Roseate miseries
 
Echo echo solo material
Waves upon the stranded
Plexiglass nobodies
Botching futurity
 
 
Harbor with Birds Looking Away
 
                    i.
Scenes bled loose
    Of degrees on the
                        Hilt-wind
 
            Gnarled screens
    Redact bladder            stumbles
Nightlife tenderly
 
                            Hoist scenes
            Of rubble— gash inflection
    At interim zoos        evaded
 
Doors or jars nailed down
                                            At stride
 
React plumage interval    sidetracked
        Gift economy notation
 
                                    Pillage
 
                                    Sensibly
 
                                    Notation  notation
 
                    ii.
    Swoon gape
    Brush anxiety
    Housing
 
    Gaiety & birds
    Appearing
    To laugh a wild appletree
 
    The divan is ragged
    Wind long gone
    A fluttering in the eye
 
 
                    iii.
            Ladders walk
 
            Innate housewares
 
            The ticket only
 
            You could win
 
            Sealed in acetylene
 
            Structure— gnarled endings
 
            A banquet of kitchenwire
 
            Shattered grief
 
            Faint animal coughing
 
            For he who is is he who does
 
            Once in awhile, in Pittsburgh
 
            Where the clockwire gets loaded
 
            By peaky kinfolk
 
            Dead moon suffering
 
            Wire angels (juggernauts)
 
            Part of the heat (lost) sealed
 
            In rooms’ viewed channels
 
            Stealthily stealthily as night redeems
 
            Agency penmanship housing
 
            Rain partisanship
 
            Interstitial delving
 
            Night where moon runs away
 
 
Dialogic Interlude
 
Night-borne reverie ripples the liquor
From your quiver. I’m standing here eating mangoes
Amid freeze-tag partitioners with all the right
Equipment. To die by moot endurance
With all chances baffled. Rise up carcass &
Vanish, or put an
End to this condition.
The more you wake, the more you quake.
 
Spread outskirts appeal to the glittering mob
Of cattle watchers, stuffed with clusters
Of willow droppings, plaintively, as night reveals
Her inborn stillness. Later,
The panoramas can yet be inspected for
Their irony & poise. Years fade
 
When convergence becomes looneytunes. Trouble a moot watcher
For some bitter water, please. Analog fortunes often accompany
Anesthetized critiques &
Shoehorn repairmen. Don’t linger by the font of animé reverie;
Study its pratfalls & metastasize silliness.
I wish Jack Collom were still here to write “a scene” with,
 
Yet “scenes” do cause a stir, & we’re even yodeling
As we strew the “course”
With golfballs. But what is seen? A shimmer or
Mirror isn’t likely to provoke
An out-of-body experience,
Unless you’re laborious as a chipmunk in winter
Playing hopscotch with kangaroos, though it doesn’t matter
 
                                    Yet, when all is after &
                                    I hear the sound
                                    Of airplanes coming.
 
 
—Mark DuCharme