Category: Metamodern


Detail from Denatured Structure by Anna Montgomery

pink magnolia
petals cascade
within the space
between the cast-
iron bed frame
and moments of passion,
my semiotic erotica

existing in the same
space as I read an
American Hybrid
Anthology – Super
Target parking lot
transmissions capture
antipoetic phrasing

immersed in disruption
of a linear, temporal path
illogicality seems actionable,
implicitly possible,
delicious even

fragments rupture an
empirical process
while immanence
revolves/devolves
in Google searches
missives in ether
petitions to digital
gods, binary masters

memory terraforms
another exoplanet
spiral galaxy
mimetic minds
contextualize
world building
half comprehensions
poems unraveling
in space-time

microcosmic bees
swarming my hive
incinerate the wasp
translucent frogs croak
a requiem . . . codification
stitches these seams

here in the room
where myths are born
Hypatia calculates an
elegant proof while
Sappho presages
a papal decree

all poetry is reduced
to ash, each word burns
away its discovery
this line will soon
alight upon a zephyr
carried to the sea

all is transformation
in a universe of energy
conservation, an unending
causal chain unfolding
from the first shift force
directing matter as
particles coalesced

within an atmosphere
of censure I carved an
ivory key, securing
esoteric runes –
legacy of what
was once lost

D'Ranged 25.6.7482 for Camilla D'Errico

D’Ranged 25.6.7482 for Camilla D’Errico

She posited a postmodern pout
a mechanized quandary
intellectual/artistic/philosophic inquiry
cyborg helmethead being
weighing on her mind

an anarchy of manga tangles
speaking unknowable truth to power
she embraces complexity
in matrices of binary contradictions
ambiguous fractured metaphysics

for a meta-human world
deconstructing her constructs
before they’re even subroutines
in an act of poetic/semiotic liberty
swirling identity round cyberspace

in an endless loop
tracing a track of thought
self-files corrupted by an
infinite stream of data input
she spins round the code

0110100101110000101010

 

I’m hosting MTB today at dVerse Poets Pub where we’re experimenting! Please join me.

The Harrowing of Hell, from a fourteenth century manuscript, Anonymous

The Harrowing of Hell, from a fourteenth century manuscript, Anonymous

Upon a muddied road
long lost to the noise
and bustle of everyday
inanity I came upon
a wound in the land

from the bottom
of the ever deepening pit
he winks his brightest blue eye at me:
‘nothing in the wide world,
of which you seem so attached,
has any real existence’

ontological jokes
for the squeamish

‘I’m a figment –
pigment stain
of your wall-eyed,
lolling fantasies’
dancing as he heckles
my raised hackles

‘ogling my impish
grin gets you nothing
but sin,’ whispers
‘it’s meaningless din,
for all is naught’

with nihilistic glee the
trickster jests his own
dark thoughts
rhyme, don’t rhyme
on moral principle –

even the damned
need amusement

he laughs aloud
‘what gods are left
to damn me?’

there is no purpose
in the gilding
of my golden cage
and my resentment
may be stonily wrought

I’d be devastated
but remember
his existence is
nonexistent, another
prank on my sincerity
and so merrily continue
my journey unencumbered

Written in response to Claudia’s prompt at dVerse Poets Pub to write a poem where character from a book intrudes. My character is Woland from The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. The title is the beginning of a poem from Eunoia by the experimental poet, Christian Bök.

Cenotaph

Willem De Kooning

Willem De Kooning

poems like Snyder’s lost ponies
gallop down shining sand dunes
all heat and sweat and neighing
great stallions of imagination
humbled in embodiment
in motion, huffing, striving
toward the blue-dark horizon

frenetic birds flit at the edge of sky
stencils against the thread of clouds
unable to escape the picture
painting landscapes of loss
singing songs of lament
at the walls of the white monastery

within the hobbled monk chants
breaks the night with his strange descant
there is nothing to accept
prostrate surrender of an endless ritual
rhythm chime of an inner bell

words cascade, an avalanche of lost meaning
roaring down the scarred mountain
felling ancient trees, thundering echoes
through fire-kissed meadows
gods hover at Duncan’s margins of thought
here in the hinterlands of a long forgotten tale