Raymond Farr



The 20-20 Experience

Baby’s in the Hyundai
With blind Doug driving

Is it no wonder I invent seedless watermelons?!

When god is just a working theory
Based on anecdotal evidence?!

& the sequence
Just ends?!

Fighting pink eye with peroxide is also kaput!

I scrub & I scrub
Screeching under oath

But can’t tolerate a guppy
Of the implausible



Instead of Suddenly

As signatories
In red pajamas

We love the new “Normal”

Its poête maudit of empty gestures
Is the fly in our gumbo

Driving us bonkers

Is the poet a suspect?
Of Loony Tunes, supper, etc?

Instead of suddenly

The room softens existentially
Breaking down boxes, setting fire to doors

(An impossible room
To leave

Happy?)



We Are Creatures

Writing this is elegy
To infinite noise

We sleep in
We step up

In sync—in space—with particular voices
Our off spring screaming in puerile darkness

                Do you hear them?
Someone is reading a passage aloud

Digging their tunnels
Thru all white
Earth





















We are creatures
We say ink

& mean death



The Ghost of Its Swordfish

Configured to
Crackle like campfires

A ripped-in-half moon

Eats circular donuts
Which faces resemble

Like phone books
Like wheels

No digital identity
But the ghost of its

Swordfish
Is a fractured

Broad daylight
Dotting the virile landscape

A password reality
Meaning

Goad the Fatted Calf
Compositionally

Next morning
I set out



The Rainbow of Such Occurrences

              As the good 
Dead Elizabethan poet 
                       I am 
I state solid states 
Exist in decline
                 I tick like a face 
Second by second 
Chance
             & this makes 
Me “modern”
Too Hugo to analyze
                    This is/is not 
A science class, kids! 
                   Thus the glass 
Of my facts
Is fractured at 
                 BANG!
                 & pages I write 
Have 22 nick names
               This is the crux 
Of a straight line 
I laugh at—

(open heart) star
Which (according to Einstein)

Can never exist
(As bovine film noir)

Except theoretically



Hang On, Mr. Head Banger!

In version 
One 
        Of version one 
A suspect—
Giorgio De Chirico—
              Attempts 
Rodeo Dr.
Half-alive & standing 
Still
           Even as tomorrow 
Speeds out
His laptop is
Air born— 
               Gunned
Into surreal
Police car—You freak, you!
Is that Parmesan cheese
                  On my new 
Bruno Margli’s?!
Hang on, Mr. Head Banger! 
           Yr mother’s a Brillo
Box I opened once  
In a book about 
                      Pop Art
Oh, damn! Are you 
Alright, spangled rain 
Drop?!
               & Richard
Dawson sd—
Show me Grunge!
               & it was like…
I meant it

The Opposite of Time in a Bottle Happens

Stealing yr “papa’s good shoes”
Galumphing them onto Fred Flintstone’s
Burly Picasso-feet
You copyright yr larceny
All sides congruent with effrontery—

Protect Me from What I Want enjambed with
Enjoined by Art Is Useless, Go Home

For ideas are bathtubs—quiet manor Sunday dinner
They bulge out the aperture
Seeming Quixotic language
As far as I can
Throw you



The Mot Juste People

Their burgeoning plasticity is our addled duality. & we all know what that means at least ½ of the time. We’re all like Shit! Did I do that? No one’s on steroids here except our poems. Our first step’s a fragment—a bloated link between links. & like plate glass in so many poems it’s weird shit. We just want bigger & bigger poems on steroids than ever we dreamed of.

Raymond Farr is author of numerous books in print, including Ecstatic/.of facts (Otoliths 2011) as well as Starched, Rien Ici, & Writing What For? across the Mourning Sky. His latest book, Poetry in the Age of Zero Grav, is due out in 2014. He is editor of the experimental poetry zine Blue & Yellow Dog (http://blueyellowdog.weebly.com).
 
 
previous page     contents     next page