Risk

Voice the corporeal
Like noon was before

In etch (or wash) of crush
By cursive demarcation

Like cacophonies’ bland holidays
Where you flip out in the wind just a little

Hashtag addendum:
Wherever you go, go where the light suits you

It’s a complicated risk
Or so the poem tells me

The poem tells me what I don’t already know
What’s the point of the visible?

Speech, when spoken
Is often not sung

Meanwhile, you go on
In a hall of mirrors

Tear the voice out from the root of its tongue
Extroverts are quicker

To show you their cellphone
Pictures, whether or not you’d like to

See
The pink of the crabapple

Blossoms, bracketed
By greeny, greeny leaves

Before you read
Hold out your tongue

Tear your voice out
Learn each other’s fears

The corridor is derailed night matter
Noon moves by stochastic means

Free your jonquils
One either is or one isn’t either

Dire to itself
Afflicted with bidding

We all know what’s good for you
Go ahead, quit music

Exceed benchmark traffic
Invent everything that you must feel

Dwell now in night storage
Where I’ll stop, like poem’s

Breath


Mark DuCharme’s newest collection is Thousands Blink Outside, just out from C22 Open Editions.  Other recent publication include Here, Which Is Also a Place from Unlikely Books; Scorpion Letters from Ethel; and his work of poet’s theater, We, the Monstrous: Script for an Unrealizable Film, from The Operating System.  His poetry has appeared widely in such venues as BlazeVOX, Caliban Online, Colorado Review, Eratio, First Intensity, Gas, Indefinite Space, New American Writing, Noon, Otoliths, Shiny, Spinozablue, Talisman, Typo, Unlikely Stories, Utriculi, Word/ for Word, The Writing Disorder, and Poetics for the More-Than-Human World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary.  A recipient of the Neodata Endowment in Literature and the Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry, he lives in Boulder, Colorado, USA.