Raymond Farr
Numb Teeth between My Eyelashes
Raymond Farr is author of Ecstatic/.of facts (Otoliths 2011), & Writing What For? across the Mourning Sky (Blue & Yellow Dog 2012), Poetry in the Age of Zero Grav (Blue & Yellow Dog 2015) & 2 e-chapbooks, Eating the Word NOISE! (White Knuckle Chaps 2015), & A Journey of Haphazard Miles (ALT POETICS 2016). Raymond is editor of Blue & Yellow Dog, now archived at http://blueyellowdog.weebly.com & publisher/editor of a new poetry blog The Helios Mss at theheliosmss.blogspot.com.
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Thumbing It Out of Padlocked Montana A bird is just A flying cup of coffee & this corn field I’m sleeping in Smells more like a fresh Xerox copy to me Than tall grass bent In the wake of a storm— A big tire fire still Burning in the motionless Fields of our lame Clairvoyance! & it’s like I’m giving you Every piece I have Of silver Montana sky & I need you to take A drive with me Out past the house With one window Where the crows peek in That glint & disappear In the silence Of their glinting Because I need A door in my life— One I won’t open For anyone but you & I need to tell you I’m not afraid of Us anymore & I need the darkness With its heaviness Of the body To stop falling All over itself & I want you to know How the asylum I was in was just This big piece Of birthday cake I ate in the rain & how death is just An odyssey now— The thousand Disposable Trillionths Of a second We have left to live Like ghosts On this earth The Mind Is a Little Village of Nuance & so I download 2 different Leaves of Grass & Deliverance & this gives my eyes the dimension Of weird mountain folk in solitude My own white hair I rumple Like snow in a sophist manner & it’s like I’m swimming thru trees A little bit drunk in the silence Of a deaf willow forest while thinking & the poem is just a poem about Rattling around inside itself & there’s no one to brush up against it With the sweetness of their laughter Only the taunt of someone Goofing with the outcome & the high grass in summer catching Fire in autumn—but where is the poem The little boy moving in the grass Makes possible? This morning I wanted to answer my phone like Someone pretending I’d died But I hesitated & I heard the desolate Beep of the machine picking up & I thought about Nantucket— The coves empty in bitter snow & how the mind is a little Village of nuance & that’s it
Numb Teeth between My Eyelashes
It was a fine feeling I had watching a homicidal TV glow in an empty room, the ultra concentrated rabbit ears of how things turned out were just now beginning to hold a signal— I am watching a handful of money burning thru these beautiful white trees.
                                                                           & though the motel I was sleeping in had this one magic window that only opened when it rained, my life was a series of poorly-framed photographs. Autumn was only a snapshot of this man in a raincoat watching my door from the highway.
                                             Winter was a Polaroid of what I did with his coat—a coat as black as trees silhouetted against whole woods of freshly fallen snow. & though I talked big, I was just a dog suspicious of the other dogs—I buried each sleepless night in Seattle & moved on.
                                                                                       & nothing I read with rapt attention, occasional hilarity, or frequent bewilderment had ever been this imaginary, this painstakingly self-exclusionary except maybe the death of the goldfinch I heard singing on the path I used to walk to work each day—a kind of death of the obvious made even more obvious by its absence.   & because it was poorly articulated like the things in my life I’d taken for granted—
It was a spring afternoon.
                                                            The sky was a big blue & white question mark choking on a woman’s blue scarf—which having gotten away from her was now squirting thru the air.
                                                                           I was radioactive. I was reticent as a man on the toilet. I was just this guy outside a strip club in Trenton & laughing at this woman dancing in one stocking.
& the sun was a bowl of bright golden flakes—a warm & nourishing goddess—her head of long hair was like the _____ of many rivers writhing in my lap. & so I entered the poem—one bare leg scraping against one stocking leg.
                                             & it was like the radio played Little Pink Houses just for me & I stuck my head out the window of a stolen car in Little Rock & sang along, screaming the lyrics at the top of my voice—but I never understood why & I was vague in the morning. Or why I was all over the map figuring things out in my head.
Raymond Farr is author of Ecstatic/.of facts (Otoliths 2011), & Writing What For? across the Mourning Sky (Blue & Yellow Dog 2012), Poetry in the Age of Zero Grav (Blue & Yellow Dog 2015) & 2 e-chapbooks, Eating the Word NOISE! (White Knuckle Chaps 2015), & A Journey of Haphazard Miles (ALT POETICS 2016). Raymond is editor of Blue & Yellow Dog, now archived at http://blueyellowdog.weebly.com & publisher/editor of a new poetry blog The Helios Mss at theheliosmss.blogspot.com.
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