Raymond Farr


Some Days Yr Life Is Shot
The director yells Action!
& Donald Sutherland steps down—Sieg Heil!

Sieg Heil!—from the deck of a space ship
The producer who pitched the film to him

Once stabbed a mailman
Oblivion, he declares, is a little green man with no dialogue!

A dream boat from yesteryear, Donald Sutherland
Swizzles bits of lunch from between his teeth

His heart is the heart of a trained stunt pony
Or a poodle playing dead on command

But his one trick is no trick—

Someone in a theater is holding you hostage, he says
& everything is bigger now than it really is



& I Am Here in Your Head
Love is a strangeness
We practice in the midst

Of occult delusion
Distance faltering in real time

The next town is 90 miles away
& like Tin Man you’re rusting now

This music is from the future
You whisper

Adding furtively Shhhh…
There are voices in the walls

& you become this explicit thing
Yr heart is a lion’s heart

Beating in a zebra’s confusing mouth
Yr voice a modulated blackness

Clustered against
What you think

What you feel is
Denver’s hallucinated sky



A Journey of 9 Hours minus Commercials
A canvas
By De Kooning

Is a big game
Of chicken

Imitating life
Mocking

As it documents
The breakfast

Of champions
The ineffable

Crazy ass
Dog eating

A guy’s ugly
Face off

& by face
It is meant

We are holding
Our tongues

We are shaving
Our beards—

Our beards
Of water!

Our beards of
Nourishing

Peanut butter!
& I am here

In yr head
The lion driving

You home
& I keep

Telling myself
This lie

In the form
Of a metaphor

But nothing’s
As quenching

As snow
You can’t touch

Or the empty music
Of abstraction

Filling us
With custard

It’s like anodyne
In every

Possible way
But the one

We don’t
Mention



Weren’t Our Nightmares Just Day Dreams?
                               Yes,
I remember now
We were headed home from church

& we day dreamed we finished
Whatever we started

                               No, we were
Leaving this place for good
& the car overheated

We thought we could still make it
A beautiful weekend



Difficult Muse
I can’t brag
With these thoughts I’m having

It’s a beautiful blue fountain Sunday afternoon
& the freshness is borrowed green pants to her

Stolen from uncle
I notice

One of us is lying
The other is writing something the other one calls

Something that’s red between lines
In the interim I’m splash dog—

                               Her spiral black dog
Sniffs my spiral black notebook

Inside us is shrub poetry
A word escaping a foggy bottom



& as I told her:

When I awoke from my nightmare Samuel Beckett was bent over me tying my desert boots— the moon was a gill on a plate of fresh fish—I don’t want you to kill yrself. I just don’t want you to become a person I can’t relate to.

& as I told her—our words let us play & play badly. A trifle like a bicycle, they take the cake & run with it into the Holocaust.

Subsequent to the car exploding I picked up a hammer & fled America—the scene in disarray, my pant legs rolled to my knees in flames. This is the history of some bums, I told her.

All I imagine, I sd, is a sad little realism—Insane room leaving the bus running. In the imitation of the imitation of the grocery store of history, the same person enters that exits. No matter who rides the apocalypse taxi, we are headed to Target!

Raymond Farr: Ecstatic/.of facts (Otoliths 2011), Rien Ici (Blue & Yellow Dog 2010), & Writing What For? across the Mourning Sky (Blue & Yellow Dog 2012). His poems appear in Otoliths, Upstairs at Duroc, Cricket On Line, & E∙ratio. His latest book Poetry in the Age of Zero Grav is due out in mid 2015. He is editor of Blue & Yellow Dog.
 
 
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