WIND IS A GIGANTIC CREATURE
look! cocksure and headstrong
a legendary winter lumbers toward
it’s a different kind of death
more of a tease and a wink
forget me unless your eyes remain thawed and your glue holds
south and east we swim to warmer waters
and squat in autonomous leagues vacated by hubristic imagineers and flying fish
this
our naked privacy
asleep with our eyes awake
looking!
FUTURE HOMETOWN GALAXY
like a palm frond that covers my dignity
a brisk blanket of wind hugs my launched probe of a soul
propelled by a wellspring of platonic ignorance
i can’t be drained like benevolent magic
in a perverted ultimatum we both lower our wards and race to the locus for two different reasons
but maybe our reasons share an ancestor
a last name
from which star fell your future frame?
WE TRY
you really tuckered yourself out in such a loving way that I had to laugh –
not at you but at the whole thing considered together
blue leopard print like digital camouflage ripples noiselessly through storytime alliterations and rocks wrinkled like old mouths
CHUM DUTY
functional tastes which can act as switches which release tumblers that open heavy steel doors
thru means of distributed labor
that keen magic
and unleash floods of talking and getting to know one another
our common tastes & other shared glistening pennies in a fountain of trillions
a fountain that flows regardless of if it’s snowing outside
or if no one is there to watch it
or to throw in their pennies
and little kids are allowed to play in it
to splash around on hands and knees
and you know what
actually adults are allowed too
why not
no teenagers though
they’ll steal all our pennies
but after all
don’t they deserve them?
our rusty experiences? –
or like a lubricant that facilitates unease and distaste like a dripping faucet
not providing enough water to amount to much
at least not yet
but making that fucking sound
and both parties listening closely and registering every drip
anticipating it
obsessing over it
and yet pretending that it’s nothing
that they don’t even notice
all the while plotting
in their privately violent fantastic imaginations
infinities of aggressions and retaliations with which to lob crabapples and rough stones
from a catapult which
thru means of distributed labor
is able to enact such magnificent assault
and to propel the hard seeds of a type of circus nihilism
cheerful
absurd
and impenetrable
into a castle that it will rapidly make disintegrate by shooting its vines in thru every crack
and flexing its cellulose biceps
so these are the options then
and exciting both
and being myself of the mind that having considered them both
separately and consistently
with an eye and an ear to detail
and nuance
and flavor
and style
is plenty well enough for me
my hands relinquish small marbleized avatars of the two moments and I roll them like dice
I lift my cards off of the table a bit to reveal to myself my hand and oh! the sweetest thing!
the cards are the same on both sides –
they have no face
no number
only a pleasing design in white, red and black lines
traced thin
I reach up to where my face should be but before I touch it I already know
I decide that it’s fine to be proud of oneself
and trying to shuffle the deck
(I don’t know how)
I shower the room in flat squares and blank textures that erupt from my fingertips like lightning.
Colin Ferguson 