October 2011
30 posts
8 tags
You wanted to be the image
of shapeless fire and waltz
to a melted clock. Sometimes
a fallen leaf explodes
to ice and ruins the construction, paper
mâché my head into something
less smokey, less pocked, less grand.
In the hand of night
we discover our youth
costumed for the dead.
-C.S. Henderson
7 tags
The lack of sleep is a tautology
for actively melting dreams where
the tightrope tells you jokes about falling.
It’s fine to tell poetry about your fear
of heights, but making that a different opinion
from the bodies of dead sparrows is cavalier
in it’s short-sightedness. A shocking
hangover comes at the thought of morning,
teeth alight with red and hot orange,
purging your...
6 tags
When The Year Wakes You
If the morning offers capitalistic
solutions to marriage with a side
of toast, consider bombing another
car to get the point across: you’re just
not interested unless it throws up
a little on the way back to your place.
The use of a cold October is knowing
another year is built in a flash
of aspirin and naseau; remember
to make peace with love over
coffee while her mouth still...
Digital chapbook: Flowers for Agamemnon
lavosxii:
Hello everyone, I wrote a series of twenty short poems and edited them into a collection over the last seven or so hours. It can be found here
Enjoy.
Say hello to your Sunday morning leisure read.
7 tags
Reject 23
If love is against the idea of art
that works, preferring machines
to automate the Greek chorus
humming, echoing, guffawing,
and hacking up the reticulated
marvel in a muck of grape skins
and lobster, we must smelt
the scaffold of dreams into tokens
before the exchange rate
balloons out of our reach.
-C.S. Henderson
6 tags
Smooth Hollow
There are attics of light,
the smooth hollow glow filling
the dim room at noon.
History might not repeat but
rhymes and makes my head
hurt further into the evening.
The TV’s on, a raving
suit yelling, “Isn’t that what
anyone would expect?” I wait
undone, the deep hull of
voice swelling and spilling over
like a locomotive bulb reaching
for a damp and dimming...
7 tags
Viva La Fragmentation
We’re only curators,
planting seeds but
only growing context
for a meal.
No wonder I
usually wake up
with a headache.
-C.S. Henderson
7 tags
I want the oil to separate
our bodies. I want it colored
rainbow and barb our flesh.
There’s nothing like a city
here, covered in field mud
amongst tomatoes glowing
like runway guides. Lost
at the damp edge of child-
ishness, we mourn the
exegesis of dying, slipped
from our hands into the mire.
-C.S. Henderson
6 tags
The day lies at our feet,
dark and wet like a woman
of strength spent from flowing
to us like molten steel
from a blast furnace.
She startles us with shadows
of blue-white teeth
stretched across
the walls, bared.
-C.S. Henderson
6 tags
After Nights With Elijah
Long grooves of earth hum
in my throat, skin pickled
like a sudden burst of wind.
Joints oiled, spilling out
and fermenting. Everything
glows with its own light,
wrapped in spirals of heat.
As I breathe I forget who I was.
As I breathe I recognize my own.
-C.S. Henderson
6 tags
What happened to the rows of my heart?
I awoke in a cold noon, the augur
of externality tapping the well of still
and the recourse of circumscribing
experience as if it were experienced.
I pry apart the snow and find myself
dripping from a tip of ice.
-C.S. Henderson
7 tags
Life does not leave, preferring
us in a ballooning city
of unfulfilled running and sitting
and getting tired if we weren’t
circumnavigating the whole
with fragmented urges
that accumulate and dissolve
like wine in our guts.
I want to look at the sky
and say something for it.
I am sad because the grey-
blue river is darker than grey
and the ocean won’t be my baby....
8 tags
VoCL, yet another draft
I’m being lazy and don’t have time to write a new poem for today, so here’s another part of that larger variation I’m working on. I wrote it last night, so it kind of counts, right? Also, Tumblr sucks when it comes to formatting poetry, so apologies if it looks odd. I did the best I could with what little HMTL I remember.
I’m afraid that the footnotes I wrote were...
7 tags
The car that promises me
the road refuses to turn over
and the subway is punishment
for panicking at birth. Chaos
obviates New York as the goliath’s
shadow, but looking out the window
on Sunday morning I can see
there’s no magic anymore. It’s difficult
not to fall into fallowness with
the sooty machines of youth dismantled
in a turn-around job. I just wish
they had...
7 tags
I split Olympus’s atom
and turned the gods to circus
clowns. It’s always a disappointment
to find the car unable to squeeze
one more in, and I made a joke
out of the tragedy, hoping its
timing genius (is it ever too late
to put a footprint in the dust
of a tumbling acropolis?).
Invention would be easy
if we could envision
these all brand new words,
and a sentence would...
7 tags
Reject 22
If love is skirting the echo
of totality by stuffing itself
into a fortune cookie
and shipping off to China,
confusing easy with East,
then the marvelous corpse
that erupts from my head
when I try to deal with the
atmosphere leaves me
a smashed mosaic
on the tarmac.
-C.S. Henderson
7 tags
Reject 21
If love is using fortune
cookies as the scaffold
for erecting a formal machine
to prove that what happens
in life doesn’t need me,
then being depressed
because I cannot exist
in a vacuum calls for
a lobster dinner.
-C.S. Henderson
7 tags
When You Weren't Here
The sun hangs
limp on its pole,
bone-narrow clouds
throw venetian light
into my coffee,
and if it were
a little hotter
I’d melt
every tiger
into butter.
There are gifts
in these days,
like rain when
a bear eats
the stars, when
your new hairstyle
knocks me and
all the trees
over, the accompanying
reverberation churns
my head. I’ll eat
fire for dessert
if...
8 tags
Hot Wednesday
A glassful of anemones
stands at the win-
dow, vomiting
abandoned sea.
A cold moon at day, a Sasquatch
in the sun, sec-
onds skitting, time
thrown overboard.
The city guards no one, I press
my tongue to its
head — fever, here’s a
glass and aspirin.
-C.S. Henderson
7 tags
Yellow eats at the leaves,
the thick honey light gunking
my tongue from rolling around in
the virtue of spending all
afternoon asleep in front of the TV.
I’d like to limb with you and drink
to get drunk, but where the time
for these goes is a question
I struggle to cup in my hands.
Into the overwhelming light
and the offness of calm night
I’d yell for rotting and...
7 tags
I concede that the world is a jumble
of missing teeth and there are many
ways to graph the figures of tragedy,
but it only works when we’re kept
interested. There are some important
colors for us to paint with, like shell
purple and AstroTurf green, on a canvas
engendered by our soft nails digging
into nectarines. I’m only eating lunch
out of frustration, the blunt edge of...
6 tags
VoCL, another draft
Whereas, I’ve mangled the diasporic
murder of tangents that continually
fly into the window of the past.
Whereas, the golden ratio of bird to
branch has allowed us to calculate,
even in daylight, the distance between
merit and stardom.
Whereas, the age of man can only
be read backwards and
we still can’t decide what is young
and what is old, yet at a
standoff we gape at...
6 tags
VoCL, a draft
this is a portion of a draft of a larger project I’m working on. I doubt the final product will look the same
We do hereby declare that we have lost the transcript to the dialogue
and try to graph it it with silly string or
make a ransom note from fast food cups, physically
trying to contain to contain the empty
caloric value of who fucked whom
or she finally saw him as
a...
6 tags
We only knew it was night
because of the leaflets
and only knew each other
because of the sound of peaches
thrown against a wall
I felt the pit of my heart
placed rowlock at your feet
and stretched a sigh
to the moon — an echo
that sounds beautiful or ugly
I don’t know
my wanting collapsed in a heap
like the silk of a pilotless parachute
the bay billows with incendiary...
7 tags
Couch Dreams
I felt the murder
of targets from under
the pillow, felt my head
sift under the midnight wrist
tied blankets;
when I am brief, I eject the new dimensions
of a tree pock-marked with nests;
when I am long, the black shifts back to blues;
when I am preoccupied, the night sticks me;
I want my tendons stretched across
deep space, I want a quasicrystal
on your finger, I want a ring
in your...
6 tags
I’ve broken our wall and now know what you sound like.
You look small, trapped,
and I’m sad that you can’t look real for just a second.
“A lot of things smell lovely —
and the music was good but everything else sucked”
is a distortion of the truth;
a lot of things smell like love and suck all the time,
but only if we pay the monthly admin fee can we...
6 tags
There are No Things in Images
whereas the moon is the dangling
rock of gravity but not in our sky;
whereas a cantaloupe is summer
sweetly slipping between nails
but not a fruit;
whereas a wallet is gaining
and losing sat upon and forgotten
but not a fold of leather;
whereas a photograph is memory
yelling in all caps but not a photograph;
whereas a poem is erotic angry
fearful sorrowful but not a diagram for...
6 tags
Anti-anti Letters
The cartography of solidarity
expects of and asserts upon us
the excessive awakeness
that reflects off the sea
at 8 in the morning. It’s not
raining, at least until
this afternoon, and if
that’s what love can be
that’s reason enough
to end ending endless
arguments depressing
at how tiresome we’ve grown together.
In shitty penmanship I scribble
a bird in the...
7 tags
Reject 20
If love left a scar on my face
and yelled at me for looking
like the moon, I’ll recant
the minimal gesture of marking
infinity in the vanilla grove
that stripped nonsense from space.
-C.S. Henderson
7 tags
Variation of St James Infirmary
I’m getting married at St James
Infirmary, baby tabled up
in a long white dress, the sweet
cold fair of being sees us there.
Let me go, God. Bless the wide
world, but not the dead man
or me, of straight legged walking
without a hat in the rain,
back boxed up and chained,
twenty bucks of gold stuck in my teeth
from eating too fast like the boys
back home woulda wanted from me.
...
