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Barton D Smock Aug 2012
choice:  genetic.

soul:  hmmmmm.

boy:  a girl in that pre-vowel morn.
JP Goss Oct 2014
1
We read the Titans in a ***** binding, stitches
Crossing in inspiring genetic code and though
Sweet winds in Elysian plans blow, peppered
On the fertile mind, great poets sowed these realms of Hell
Petite scholars pass cursorily, in attempt or ignorance
This classroom won’t appreciate, for years behind, years until.

There was substance in their parting wrists, or ninth ring
Of some divorce in descending rings of darkness and liquor,
And binding chains clasped too numbed from vacillation
I find the journey down their spiral, sad but beautiful
Who wakes with them on either side: design, ebullient suicide?

They lie before me, still vivacious, I lay on looking
In their papery autopsies revealing nothing but scars,
Nothing but the inexplicable, the inescapable prophesy of war
So distant, papery, eternally recurrent and so beyond us men,

Did you sacrifice yourself for the poem, little shred of self
For the gleam of light of day in time of the beloved belated?
What caught your heart, the one you slain, that looks past us all
But moves beyond tears—something ungraspable you had to shed
Life to attain, whose mockery was impetus, just as it was bane.

Pray tell, does it hurt to, in time, become absurd?
A living contradiction, a multiplicity, tiny strings, and blood
Black as ink and nihilism, but swooning, structured, and romance
Pure dialectic, two bodies of verse coincide; a black hole
Dark and Worse. The ultimate catharsis of poetry, lived in every line.

#2
There were abysses in those falling leaves,
Fullness of a lighted walk, irreclaimable annihilations
And empty existences. Now, we write them
Write them down, on these falling loose leaf scraps.
But what has been, is smashed to bits, eventually withering
Eventually splits; yet, something of history is fed from their breast
And we know the miseries that were forewarned.
Ever shall we follow, now that you’re died and died ever on?

To Hell with Socrates; art’s no imposter, but the rudiments
In fact it rears us philosophers, asks and answers all questions
We’re all philosophers: we know what knowledge denies,
Laughs at, and awes: the sole thing nihil cannot belie
Therefore, the pantheonic blood is spilled and I
Drink headily. Draw the same course and dark spirit
That plucks the ferns pushed through the crack
From the grains of aged monuments, past frisson of
Repeated denouement and Time’s cynosure has lent.
The poets may suffer but know what we don’t
And die just to find the panaceaic solution to death
For they, they will never die, and we will pass, unleft.
Thulani Dec 2020
Seeing through me
Sulphur singes the face of foes.
The inferno beneath him leaps
as inside outs on key
and spills an invite to woes
of the hanging Judas who weeps.
The pride he borrowed has broken,
His bottom barren. Ravaged within a burrow
He is cursorily spat.
He is cursorily let
Strengthened and channeled
at heart he is good
A reminiscence of Mary of Magdala
He nourishes as he sustains
to replenish.
Seeing through me
Aquacade ails the face of friends
Seeing me through
                                                          
                                                                             Thulani A. Luthuli
The correspondence she writes is in the shape of a dog−
fills them with anecdotes of dressers

and the first two years of her life spent in a drawer.
We meet in Zurich over a nightmare –
(sleep under an argument)–

Travel to Berlin where a priest walks between us.
She promises to write.

Her letters are like a leap year. She writes riddles
about the price of post and serious Marian treaties –

only cursorily mentioning the living.
I read her letters like an eating

disorder. I try to decipher the hermetic meaning
of the word Shvod in all the margins.
Her last line reads,

“I must beat the walls it is March…”

— The End —