VOLUME SIX (2020): ARCHIVES ON FIRE

Monday, November 30, 2009

Ray Gonzalez, "4 Poems"

Ray Gonzalez

4 Poems


MILES

Weather as token flipped inside trumpet wig. Calibrated dimension invited the clear the subjective response where data annexes previous attempts to decipher the closed window. The staring is incomplete and involves ancient theory of magnetic fusion with vowels and feathers originating in abolished countries never charted or dreamed.

Favors instead of visions, dynamics of a clay bowl. Agreement is made to announce a handful of salt is more effective than touching the right buttons at the moment of closure. Several components were left out of the bomb invention amidst the flowers and trees and the moment of collision was hidden inside a book no one opened, minimizing shrapnel.

Composing a thesis. Careful examination of the staring individual discovers the blank page is the field beyond the staring, a meeting place for the salt grains from the hand and the pure confession moving out of the eye. If peace came out of the jigsaw puzzle, it was mistaken for a flock of birds entering the fire and emerging as planes of truth embedded in a sore, watering eyeball.

Artifact corruption, staged withdrawal, eyebrow embrace contradicted. Chirping sounds, humid armpits, angry digression revealing how the outline of the rejected biological father got there. The complete invitation would have included two jump ropes, a silver dollar, eight bottles of milk, and the perception everything is sensual and afraid.

Confession is ignored, windows drawn quietly. Calibrated dimension invited to declare transformation of the breast into a mountain imitation that does not allow climbing or the essential union of cell and hair. A few moments were given to the prized illumination that changed equations and corrupted the wires leading to the transformation of vocabularies.

Weather as metal token music, eyeball forgotten pickpocket. Mounted canvas, white sheet absolved of struggle between the plain and the creator signifies how often the geometrical kiss becomes the couple involved in mythic sins. History antithesis news arrow-shaped and hurtling toward uncreated space where the decision to completely erase the plot was made over a bowl of frozen shrimp.

Trumpet castigation, underwater ear, no end to wanting trouble, mystified union. The hand now empty of salt, holding onto the light that sperm gives when it is spilled at random, the letting forth not given a name because the calculations remain on a copy of the disc. The mind embrace is a fiction designed to thwart geniuses and allow the bare foot to accomplish syntax and move itself under the clouds without being noticed.

Enrapture fingers upheld. The size of the thumb has a great deal to do with this and it is about to reveal what really happened when the streets were plowed after blizzards renamed thought. Intervention where the white surface awaits composition declared without the fulcrum or bended knee. Soon twig, someday paper.

If the circus went home and gave itself away, the face paint would be washed off to create colorful patterns in the sink that would someday lead to an involvement and a flaw once removed from the diamond, the head bowed in grief, followed by discipline and threats, murmurs that don’t restart the system, dark centuries in the heart of arrogance, contradictions as churchyard crusades where no calibrated dimensions are allowed because they do not believe the cleanest text is the forgiven word that ignites desire.

The situation activates the senses even if confession is outdated and the first item to be stolen has to do with a signature and a way of recording how often it rained. Blame blast. If the language line is allowed to function and become a tricky text in the history of trickster manipulation, then a wasted habit and its retention takes place without matchbooks.

The weather that was lost in this was the environment in which to prove the idea that the complex geometry of messing with proper lyrical saturation is an act of conformity. Any kind of sorrow must be left out of the pages selected as guilty, though guilt is outlawed in the process of avant-garde proclamation. If only the shrewd approach was worth it, the suspenders of the fat man would hold.

It is the way the brain functions and pretends there is something extracted into the air to be pronounced holy and visionary, though human. What if every single word of every single line of every single stanza was blown-up and laughter shifted the earth’s axis? The true self is a stranger in this film. The oceanic self is a stranger in a roll of meat. The caustic self is a crayon in this shade of mistake. The boring self is a bore granted books on an earth without books.

Perhaps this list of things is simply a co-host and the philosophic dance is merely a troubled style of poetic stupidity that steals everything the tradition brought forth with a trumpet. If time out was an idea, then time in could be the next phase.


THE ONE WORD DEVICE

after Thomas Cook

I must be a scar. Glad window. Frozen domination of the period. Escarpment. The wheel used to spell "blood." I must be a scar. Look of expertise. Placement overrides shadow. Pattern commits to motion. Footprint. Proud concrete.

I must be a scar. You should have been the paradise of form. A watt of beauty. Torn ear sounds like torn ear. The path leads across the field. I must be a scar on that road. Anything the gods want to send. Lack of attention to Greek myth. Cheese derives from trying too hard. The child is asleep in the back. Midair wail. The background mist. A system of articulation noted for its ability to transcend ______.

I must be a scar. The shovel and the fat eye. Taboos. Explicit Rex. Frank O'Hara. He doesn't come out to play on his birthday. He is not a scar. The idea one week later. The period one week after the comma. The comma one week after the hook, which says, "I must be a scar." Sad window. Melting domination of the period because the line is driven away from the one word device. You were never a scar. You were a sentence.


THE USE OF WHITE SPACE

The use of white space on the page was invented when you told the truth. This gave your words plenty of room to pronounce themselves, though your voice was embedded in a population explosion of pop culture and pop corn. This series of pops moved the white space beyond borders and taught you that hominoids were found in the honey pot before you had a chance to be the first to dip your fingers in there.

The use of white space ruined the formation of condolatory mambas that slithered between the sentences, until you had no choice but to redefine the linguistic node of the incorporated simulation that reformed reptilian need into sideboard fingers playing upon your keyboard. When white space was reconsidered by graphic ideologies, the absence of letters on pulp visualized a cause in four languages, though you know only two and accept the theory that people who speak more than one language remain sane and pure, their tongues licking the white space in search of other alphabets.

The use of white space is based on your need to construct what works as an expansion of what grows on the window ledge, your habit of pure seeing tied down on the page to waste a few trees and pile up the failed manuscripts full of blinding snow that might be the exact dimension unable to paste itself onto a printed sheet of paper that contains your sole confession toward forgiveness because the white space always stays ahead of what you need to write, this obvious moment wrapped in fumes from an extinct bottle of white-out, that force you haven’t smelled since the white space refused to be corrected years ago and the page got away with a typo that changed your life.


SIX FACES OF ADMITTANCE

First face inside the window of your elbow, guiding you toward confession and valuable costumes, branding you the mute commissioner who ran out of walking canes in time to take on a new face. Second face outside your nose, gently breathing on you so you feel the partnership is a boundary of heart and lung, water that spins your head and lets you feel the touch. The third face reflects off the glass and mouths silent words you are supposed to imitate, their meaning hidden in its wrinkled profile, the age of composition moving the glass our of your way. The fourth face belongs to a god who let you borrow it for the change of weather where raining mountains say you cannot be born again without multiple faces. The fifth face comes along as the stranger who removed your baby face by giving you a chance to be someone else in the picture frame.

The sixth face has not arrived. Waiting for it places confidence upon the first which returns again, this time shedding its skin by slapping you once, then flying away. As you stagger in surprise, the second face comforts you by growing a beard and taking you with it, your rough face now someone’s hairy face. This signals the third face to return as the long lost pharmacist who tries to read the prescription on the glass, but the fourth face censors what was and lies about what is going to be, the details of a godly face kept hidden from you when reflecting surfaces are taken away in time for the fifth face to bring you the ancient look of a dying, old man. This face doesn’t fit your frame, your skull, or even your mind that has worked hard to resemble every face the streets have brought. You pause to catch your breath and this makes room for the missing person, the sixth face, who is out there somewhere. You wait and the silence of looking like someone else calms the air, lowers the light, and lets you sit back in your favorite chair, whatever face you are wearing falling asleep as you doze off, wondering when the sixth face will come and what it will look like.
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Ray Gonzalez is the author of eleven books of poetry, including the forthcoming collection of prose poems, Cool Auditor (BOA Editions). He teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
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