Mark DeCarteret


Thereabouts

You’ve yet to apologize
for petting my fin again:

the tongue tamed how often
as well as its dwelling place.

From now on till whenever
my stake here is managed by shadows:

what so often ends up being some home,
another riff on some past life, the timeless

we are never quite sold on enough
to take w/us to the next world.


IV

At long last the tongue has surrendered
to the flame’s latest take on infinity

& the holes which had once promised song
have now let me see clear through bone:

get me somebody good w/a scalpel,
get me somebody good w/a light.

How the crocodile king dons its carousel crown,
all those fears of mine finally made flesh.

I am drug free I am drug free I am drug free
I am drug free I am drug free I am drug free

But much rather the dry heave of wordlessness
than the excruciating measure of this.


The Twilight

Resort back to notorious spine re: flaunting of someone’s stability w/the (re) assurance of a ready made contract: what’s been this shimmering lash & then that’s about it but the evacuated haul & green nipped persistence of rubbered (known) depletion stalked empathy & demands of our smell (or all the senses combined?) in the crotch of the tree’s pad-plant stirring & shiny coated deceits (insects left) writhing in ecstasy chewed up toads hopping into one dimension from another where she’s wilting this throttle of lightning being powersawed stumped plastic hair (cut to) rhinoplasty boy sharing his scars-tinder mocktrialed & curtained w/the making of videos & the obligatory coming of bedchat.



Mark DeCarteret's work has appeared in the anthologies American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon Press, 2000), Places of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poetry (Story Line Press, 2000) and Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader 1988-1998 (Black Sparrow Press, 2000). A chapbook (If This Is the) New World was just released from March Street Press.

 
 
 
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