Saturday, May 11, 2013

poems || John Pursch

Being

Who speaks in tones known only 
to the raven’s husky midnight scrape 
of pawns, nails, and artificial teeth? 

When we see metallic envoys 
easing down a city street, 
why do we naturally run for cover? 

Wooden cracks and time warps 
hamper our descent, 
but friends still turn a frozen hiatus 
into campfires of bronzed eternal youth. 

Arched potential fills the solar beat, 
laughing into random pleats 
of dawning marigolds beneath 
the glorious rush of graveyard 
boots at high noon, soaring through 
the unlocked doors of future’s leaden gaze. 

Ahead in absolution’s sure, directed drift, 
the essence of our mythic haze dissolves, 
implicit in its stepwise urge, waving 
clean precision from ocean tide 
to bone-chewing brawn 
to full phenomenal light.


What Absence May Be

Rustling pages and sound of the pen, 
gorges of sampled demise, 
filtering truncheons and cattle car cries, 
plentiful mirrors of flexible farce 
and swamps that go soft to the touch, 
whimsical neon and pylons of hope, 
rippling vermilion at dusk. 

How drafty, this logic 
of spanners and bees, 
of simpletons given to greed; 
how bleary, this nascence 
of trailing divinity’s 
dismal secretions and 
cool prophetic oaths. 

How hot can it be? 
I don't have a watch; 
I carry a clock to the sea. 

How far shall we go? 
Who cares what we say? 
They marry and follow the road. 

The burgeoning trees of familial girth, 
obscene in obeisance to nudes; 
the criminal trust in imperial bonds, 
obeying our terrible deeds;
in a comment on decadent smitten disease. 

Page upon page upon pages go by 
and I don't know what I write; 
the pen glides along and symbols flow on 
but I'm all alone in the crowded blue day 
and the water is cleared of what absence may be.

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