Philip Byron Oakes

No Explanation Necessary

Requisite parlance to a stutter lolled for flavor
in helping the medicine go down. At the behest
of the lest we forget our names, when summoned
to the little pieties. In lightening the facts to
float a theory to the surface of the bone of
conviction. Coded requiems for a silence
of misgivings as to what to say in lieu. Cripple’s
introduction to easy slides down banisters, into
loving arms that know the speed of a limp
into the picture. A shopping cart of fat chances
careening through the story of durable goods.
The world wide road in a parallel parked universe.
Bottled up in common knowledge.


One Way to Tell

Perpendicular crimes wearing broad
daylight. Evaporative eye pool averting
run-ins with the law of diminishing
returns. Stopping for directions to heal
the way homeward, through a glaze
of labyrinths undaunted. Life mumbled
into the fix of being free.

Sedentary action heroes sitting on the
denouement for the time it takes from
time to be the other. Wanted in the
having been mistaken for only you.


next

separately sequel to one of a kind of the sort you might expect to see riding zebras into the great beyond the right to appeal the ending in an ellipse on an airfield humming with the potentiality of flight of the tinkerbelle variety into a sparkly wake of the essentially grounded by the mindset of the ancients strutting along through the stratosphere with calipers taking gauge of clouds long suspected of scooping with a ladle from celestial funds obscuring the wealth of cruel summer skies biting into the horizon’s depth of detail as to the suffering sold as sympathy so that it might never stray into the extinct as imagined in glossy photos of the prince and his entourage dispensing memorabilia with a flair befitting the archaic in the annals of years uncounted for what they were in retrospect crashing down on the table with the aplomb of well considered apples making a mockery of the fruit salad arrayed as jewelry of the fall into murky origins where things can stay that way forever

Philip Byron Oakes’ work has appeared in numerous journals, including Otoliths, Switchback, Cricket Online Review, Sawbuck and Taiga. His first volume of poetry, Cactus Land (77 Rogue Letters), is now available.

He blogs here.

 
 
 
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