Poetry

Cinematic pan out

as I run to the train

fleetingly wondering if I packed my inhaler,

weighed down by textbooks

and the nagging backwards pull of tardiness.

I n s l o w  m o t i o n

the last passenger climbs the steps and is swallowed by the metal mouth.

What about me?

I have my ticket.

Bought it online

so I could be on time.

Dramatic close up

as I grab the handle of the silver door.

It's cold with November kisses

yet I can still feel the pink warmth of human flesh that lingers there.

I lingered too.

That's why I'm late.

A swell of orchestral violins and cellos

(Medoza's Theme: Always One Second Behind)

as I beat sense into its skin

trying to grab someone's attention .

A montage of faces of passengers

as I am dragged along, legs following someone else's orders

stop. go. Run faster. There is still hope.

They crescendo, but the violins have dropped away, the cellos only a tremolo,

background buzz for sneers.

Or are they pitied sighs?

Zoom back to me,

setting the beast free

grabbing at a fistful of hair

molding curses from puffs of air

and the credits roll away on the rail.

        The safest way to travel is by train. A train is solid and familiar, never straying from the old

1. 1.  Time:  (Ir)rational

Caffeinated sleep

Every night I sober myself with a cup of coffee hoping to stay afloat in the watery nest of sleep. As consciousness partially washed away I hover near the surface, vulnerable at any second to the shattering sound of my alarm clock. Dreams, petrified, refuse to be concrete, whirling around in diaphanous strands, its density diluted into a pellucid reality. Sleep, its fingers touch me but lay no claim, tremulously and without confidence, self-conscious of being alternative, for it is listening eagerly to my heart, the heart that keeps pulsing toward the beat of the industrial world, denying its existence, declaring that I am not captured, that I am still marching to the daylight drum, that I am free from non-sense and do not indulge in distortions by desire. I’m domesticated by modernity. I wait to wake up. I thirst for the brilliance of cosmopolitan cities. This dark thickening poison, so holy for our contemporary time with conscious rational humans on its pedestal, I swallow it.

(sights)

(sounds)

(              )

murmurs in the background

it’s an optional world

a past unoriginal, un-whole,

and a present unacknowledged

BETWEEN WORLDS

fence electric hum
high tension highwire
balancing brinkman

ocular rivalry
criticise silence
drawn to lacuna minima

hemisphere boundary
k-means crackle
open balls excluded

diaspora'd deity
zero one never member
blackboard torn

SILENCE SCIENCE

no prisoners fallen carcasses
preserved in basement mortuary
not dead but hung urethane
mocked analyzed
violated terminally paralzyed

stimulate observe
exhume exhibit exemplify
silence science

between these battered shelves is war
subject battleline partitioned relics
ye who choose to make thy home
in theatre expect destruction
bulldozer carrion

no eating drinking
no talking or whispering
silence science

LIE

inconsistency
ruptures
bleeding for maintenance
shovelling gaping
requiring ministry
rewrite citations
sequent mountains
overlap rivals
exhaust constraints
burn glucose
maintain mountains

FIRE MOUNTAIN

runes
ruined
rubble
wrecked
ploughing
parched

futile cultivated crust
pathetic geometric etchings
removed and reconstructed

theorem
towers
await
centennial
belching

HEMISPHERES

battlefield tireless
advances inches
recruits spills ATP
threatens islands of certainty

territory irony on magma
each society temporary falls
destroy rebuild reuse merciless
heckling hemispheres

 Untitled

Jessye Cohen-Dan

re-           

membering:

he tells us, putting back the pieces of something broken, or merely,

            made loose at the seams.

members like limbs,

like these clubs I am not sure I want to pay the

dues for. times are lean and I may need

to scribble over the margins,

I may need to borrow your pen on the train.

the seams of me             split