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South City Lady Sep 2020
Do you ever feel
that there is a greater story
living inside you than the one
you wake up to
each day,
one richer,
more prismatic,
where you can dress
in your bohemian voice,
open oak paneled doors
once denied you,
become all the radiant
seasons speckled
in russets
and autumn golds,
pale peonies,
and Titanium whites?  

Do you ever imagine
the mirror's reflection
as the real you
standing beyond your
mind's limitations?  
What would it take
to awaken
on the opposite
side of your thoughts,
to dream in excess
& possibility beyond
the confines of this
reality to a world
where you become
all that you can imagine?
Norman Crane Sep 2020
They built the rhinoceros because God
foretold of coming war in which they'd need
sanctuary from the evil unthawed
beasts Earth's burning would hellishly unleash.
They built him of steel and electronics,
infused with a human intelligence,
and huddled raw within like unmade bricks
within a kiln, until their God dispensed
His justice: No escape / the heat turned on
They baked / the devil-beasts of *****
Inspired by Vladimir Kush's painting "Trojan Horse" and playing around with traditional sonnet form. This is my attempt at an instasonnet (everything on IG is shorter, right?), reduced from 14 lines (ABAB CDCD EFEF GG) to 10 lines (ABAB CDCD EE).
Norman Crane Sep 2020
You and I canoe down neon waterfalls,
Smelling cinnamon and sinsemilla,
Through sockets cascading melted eyeballs,
Intermixed with honey and vanilla,
We push paddle towards combusting shores,
Cloaked in pellucid smoke and glimmer mist,
Black sky alive with buzzing glowbug spores,
We must inhale to know that we exist,
But what if the hazy vapor-stew's too thick,
Paddles stick: viscosity of time,
When the sporal secretions make us sick,
What will become of the horizon line,
Will it burn to charcoal reality
Or conjure us sublime finality?
Norman Crane Sep 2020
hold the match under your chin
unscrew your skull
and pack the kindling in
then strike a flame
inhale the light
your mind will burn so long and bright
Norman Crane Sep 2020
He was a toad catching flies
Except that with each lashing of his tongue
He pulled down aircraft
And long could be heard their cries:
Blessed be, Amphibian Creator!
Death to America!
Frog is greater!
Norman Crane Sep 2020
A spiralling ascent
Along the world's edge
Sweatdrops fall
To a below without sunlight
Boot dust
Llamas labour under supply packs
Hoof beat lantern dance
Shadows cast on the cliff face
Distorted we loom
Above the mute fog of humanity
Summitous
Awash in the final dawn
The old Inca smiling sprouts his knife
Ancient tapestral landscape
Exhales into us
Curvously infolding
The old Inca holds out his hands
The knife cuts horizontally
Reality opens like a book upon a tabletop
There, he says,
Pointing to the infinite space between where the sky in the past met the land
Timespace lies like a discarded washcloth
And we see dimly through the mists—
There, he says,
Pizarro could not follow us,
And we see dimly through the mists—
The neon lights of
Neoqusqo
Norman Crane Sep 2020
The mountain grows much slower than your perception of the mountain growing taller, as the dynamics of the sea, which sculpts the earth beneath your feet, speaks—summoning the breeze: isn't it surreal, living on God's pottery wheel?
Norman Crane Sep 2020
From the eleventh floor
the world looks small
and possible

The cars
     black and white
     parked perpendicular
          to the curb
     parallel
          to each other
are keys
     ebony and ivory
    
I reach out
through the window
and play the street like a piano
Norman Crane Aug 2020
Among the hideous shapes
   you are my favoured
For the wretched silence of your scoliotic spine
   flavoured with our crimson wine:
Blood diamonds
   screaming songs of sirens
   writhing on a desiccated island's edge
Boiled alive—
   can be distilled into the language of a pledge
I hereby promise to be yours
Foretell you will be mine
Norman Crane Aug 2020
Stick your knife into my crown,
Slice down to the chin,
Dig your fingers in,
And unwrap the skull within.
Stretch and dry this ****** leather,
Draping it over a conical framework of bone,
Ends glued together or sewn,
Next: sever
The skull from the spine,
Polish to a shine,
And ***** into the base of your lamp,
Plug in: electron flow illuminating my mind,
Aglow with ideas
Of a submission radiantly divine
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