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Glottonous May 2015
James, you make my eyebrows feel so heavy.
To think: if I never find the one and one make too many empty glasses were broken in the mud-
dled my words when she asked for the time for bed –
All during my morning constitutional.
Take your ***** on the Mount and your Sin of the Farter
Because I know there’s nothing behind the artist except falling towers and furniture-sellers.
But can the deaf still listen?
Or should I care what’s inside a box I can never open?
And how many carriages will follow my coffin
And who will be my wormeaten neighbors
And which tongue will be employed to engrave the epitaph
And topped by what symbol or none?
 
In the beginning the first two words began to breed
And each generation issued reduplication
Evolving vestigial verbiage and new punctuation
All the way down to a young Poet-Hero-Creator:
Use illusory contours to paint the gravity between heavenly bodies, and use
The shared human experience of multistable perception to imply the gestalt of Dublin
(and be sure to use that German term).
We are the artificers of meaning.
 
Item: the location of the key.
Cat: things I should be thinking about but am not.
Item: the *** organs of strangers and acquaintances.
Category: things I should not be thinking about but am.
Item: the autobiographical component of Shakespeare’s later works.
Cat: things I need you to know that I think about.
Item: the possibility that my presence is not nearly as commanding as I’d formerly assumed.
Item: the increasing inebriatory similarities between myself and my father.
Item: the fear of losing my memory of Mother’s face,
as directly correlated to the expanding passage of time.
Cat: things I need you to think I don’t think about, at all.
 
Picture a symphony.
Hold the moment when the lights first fall and the cacophony of tuning
Floods into a single, synthesized vibrating tone. After the silence and before the song.
Write what you hear.
Write the chords in semiotic rhyme; transcribe harmony as memory:
Sing lived and unlived love and stride through on inkblot feet.
Now add the missing notes.
A poem about nothing.
Cecelia Francis Mar 2015
God willing to
play the character
and dress us up accordingly

I want puce gloves and
green boots: a contradiction

Do I contradict myself?
very well then, I contradict
myself
Cecelia Francis Mar 2015
Heart going like mad
yes, to my mountain flower
I said, I would, yes
Connor Mar 2015
Rejoice!
Joyce!
The girl killed in a tragic car accident
in 1973.
Picked up from the earth.
You were lifted tenderly
to a place
coveted by
forlorn corpses
that walk New York City
in their dry-cleaned business suits,
attending the ritualistic Sundays
in cross buildings.
While it soaks in,
while death is now the life
you live
there’s a
ship coming crewed
by all your favorite people you never knew.
Every missed connection,
lost crush,
pets passed away
they echo in song
to the Nursery shores
your bare feet freshly plant
on.
Joyce Wells,
Farewell!
You’re on to another road, now.
This revenant path
with more sudden turns than Lombard street
on clammy mornings.
However the incessant
afterlife treats you
it was nice to know you, Joyce Wells.
We’ll all miss you dearly.
You’re currently in a Morgue
at some cinder block hospital.
You’re currently on a viking ship
set for a frosty-tipped valley across the sea with
Molly, a stray cat your family adopted when you were three,
and Micheal Donahue, your first love.
While the world keeps spinning,
while your casket is buried.
While in 1974 it rains,
there’s an ease in knowing
that Joyce Wells would be
delighted to hear
that she was
freed.
Cecelia Francis Jan 2015
"Tell me to stop if
you want me to stop." God, that
was a **** good dream....

Hope of her future,
one there before her, crying.
freedom: white stockings
Cecelia Francis Jan 2015
The day of
her affair

And Poldy
-in love-
allowing it

A father invites a son
into the kitchen,
talking before
he walks
him
out

Reentering
the house at night
filled with evidence
of Boylan

Crumbs brushed
off the bed
-ten years
since-

Feet at the head
and head at the
foot, a behind
kiss to Gea-tellus
Earth mother
Cecelia Francis Jan 2015
To be like
the older
Dedalus
blood wooed
by grace of
language and
gesture,
blushing

conceding
to take a
cigarette
to have something to say yes I said yes I will yes for

— The End —