[Newspoetry] The Paws of Poetry Pausing

[DL Emerick]

Decreation.  I pause, mauled in mall.

Today, of course, is but a day of me --

One so full of yesterday’s trophies.

I might I make up today, tomorrow,

When every yesterday is forgotten.

 

I picked up this Anne Carlson’s book,

Several of them, really, to dis-own,

To possess a barrier against poetry,

Not hers, but mine, perhaps, or me.

 

Words feast on words -- cannibals:

Remind me: do bodies play together?

Bodies of half-eaten, chewed words,

All buried in me, indigestible taboo,

Bury me alive, in anechoic chamber,

Her pawing my death remains, me.

 

Decreation.  I foresaw its creation;

I saw it after it came to be, to die.

 

Decreation.  I saw its undecoration,

Reshrouding wreaths we lay at tombs,

Where we fall somber, grave-minded,

Décor-relating our core lives, a chore.

 

All scars writhe under scabs of words,

Unruly mob marks picket line protests,

Fixes for bayonets to run-riot squads;

Running down, blood cools our living.

 

I fear: zombie in an electrical box,

Static snake-rattles in nervous cage,

Shocking no one by its own capacity;

Charge: escape into freezing ground.

 

A pain box is buried in this plain plot,

Closed and sealed, security, homeland.

Above that empty spot we plant an X,

An equation carved, explaining a life:

Some name, some word, and some date.

Reduce relatives in reference frames,

Time is nothing if not living its time.

 

History preserves; mortuary science.

Cadavers become one body of history:

We plant today and dig up tomorrow.

 

Anne para-cites on Holy Roman Ovid,

“
so much wind here stones go blank”,

So blank here, winds get stoned; oy vey.

Her, so blank, stones get wind of it

To speak, face emits farts of facts.

 

Is poetry a pause, to watch the dead?

A watch upon the dead, over a grave?

Death is not a still life, changing not.

Only when blurs erase life in motion

Do eyes beat death faster when seen?

Magic lies in eyes gone blind enough

To see nothing fixed in a blank stare.

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