Mark Lamoureux (NYC, USA): Four Poems

REFLEXIVE

I wilt the love of name & bone

I range the shore of the day

I see the speaking machines

I hear the prophet bleed a copper pool

I waste the gold of shores

I length the gavel of the brook

I little songs & I without want of face

I the gloaming make of 4 a cube

I broken anaphora, the token splice

I smell hoodlum, no father

I this the electric taint of reflex

I bait the circle-hustler

I amuse the end time, the bronze ass

I for the bastion of naughts

I cross the angle, reflect

I seize no happening, fulfill this

I the scored days into another

I wait, I won 1, I fake nasty

I into wet evening the

I spit out, dawn folds

I blanket in the sea-spray

I no more forever in regret


LEGACY

A grove fills with the deflated
skins of fruits that thud
from the flailing limbs of a trunk
that bores through the skull-plate
of my imploding sphere. The pilgrim
wades through bathwater as tough
orbs give only thin milk. Brittle
hammer you were born with. Is
not enough. All of this. Shoulder-
blades stretched to sails, the leaden
fists, tiny whorls carved in each
cell of the root are not enough.
This breeds a carpet of tin hairs.
Clouds of beetles persist in splotches
thereupon like weather. Braids
of ooze that suck carbon from the firmament
are no good to you: void-born
& suffering, hard-won parade garb
lifted from your cracking clay
like a fly on a line. The disembodied
shirt prances. There is no party
inside. Are not enough. The missives
& the lens. Not enough. The umpteen
charged scrolls. Never enough,
the gilded membranes & skeletal
adaptations. A birthright, what is
eaten by the sea, a betrothed what
burrows in the shore. A chapter,
closed, what smiles from the shade
of kind light. Remember me
to the bell that rings in the buoy--little
brother, we of like duration.


LAOCÖON GROUP

A crest of molten dust
falls forward into erasure:

I tell myself I will
not go
even as I arrive
there, in a trough,
corvettes of the new speech
befuddle the dock, solemn
ekphrasis a sunless gnomon:

11 or 12, a fortnight
of relentless
logic, each candle
gutters
in turn or the
difficulty


MOST LIKELY TO

I am not your avenger,
I was never.
Look, there are no lines
on my palms, nor have I pin
to etch them.

I am slamming a door
with one hand & with the other,
I am slamming another.

Something sets, a chestnut
husk, between my two
eyes; tern’s wings scissor
turbulence not even
they can see.

© Mark Lamoureux 2007