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.