Mark DuCharme



from Alchemical Nod



THIS IS NOT A ‘DREAM SONG’ (1)


If I talk about waking
Am I uncertain of my allegiances,
My alliances, my dalliances & allegations
Flitting?

If I think about waking
Is the dream no longer real
Or am I just bare need
Fucking the air?

(Whom do you fuck
In the air, with breath flickering
& When do you decide
You are ‘real,’ dear fucker?)

If you agitate the night
Are you no longer real
In this hybrid work of alcoves
On which even the Sun descends?



ANOTHER ANTI-DREAM DREAM POEM


Magenta flower labels, or lapels
An etiquette of dreaming
Outside oneself. What ships could ever
Launch a thousand facets?
What breath takes root
In thine own marrow?

Noon, don’t wake me
I’m falling into my other breath
Lucid as clouds over Nantes or club soda
Where the Ice Queen wickedly gleans



THIS IS NOT A ‘DREAM SONG’ (2)


The first gray hairs of noon
Twitch in my thinking
Like amber lungs
Describing my soul lost

Are you here in
Faint vivisections
Of a heartbreak which frees me
Until epochal noon hates

And now, back to the dream
To return to all your scorn
In a remote madhouse of misery
Through which I am freed of my name



Dream


I dreamed Laura fell in with
Some shady
CIA operatives
Who’d drugged

Her, keeping her
Against her
Will.

I rescued her
From the hotel room
Where she was being
Held

& We were fleeing
Across Europe—
But the operatives
Had planted

An explosive device
In her body
Which, swallowed, does not pass
Through the digestive

System,
But communicates electronically
With a chip
Implanted

In the back of her
Neck. I found the chip
& Removed it,
Unwittingly

Setting off the
Device, &
Killing us
Both.

“They can kill with
Impunity.”

---

from Counter Fluencies


      67

I am
Moi-même, the conditional

Left in the thicket
Of words

Words & their blurrings &
Turning about

“About,” without, but never here
Rarely ever

& Undone
The vowels are suns which bore

Deep into night sky
The vowels are swarms

& I is an element
Of my vocabulary

The body of forms
Swerves & flickers

As if light were bent
Always, in time, heaven-sent

•

In plight of knowing
Still as what
Was lost in frantic
Gestures
Given
Given over to
Measure
When east is sea &
Sky is cost
& What coasts is never
Tethered
Left of stun, to break
Only & always when we ache

•

In heavy breath
Of what was formed feared
Against irresolution
& The tighter
Drafts of news-speak
Up against the sayable
Chronic itch of spoken
Brokenly
Still as what was cast
Against the hardline
Double
Left of sense, but nearer
Nearer, nearer to breath

•

Jouissance in pink winter
& Light’s caress on treelimbs
Moving through spasmodic
Time forwardly in a glint or timbre
Which dreaming does not make
& In a wicker banter
Grounded up to the beltbuckle grill
& Winged past mojo terminus
Thrashy monochrome baubles
Which even time regrets
If laughter were flintier & in dayglo brackets
& Prayerflag poems hung from tombs on vistas
To visit the capacitance of sparrows      leafing
Up to sky’s seams

*

Whom to call
Whom to fall
Hum the whistle
Or measure, intransitively
Leaping
Through night’s scenes,
Its cold
Suggestions
Wintered in umber
Weather

•

The life we spent
In living
Or going about
Keeping
All of winter’s
Hearts private
Private as can be measured
Over evening’s blaring
Tune

•

In winter one’s awakened
Over-starry
Drifted
Deep in the heart of
Capital
With all the shivers
Bent

•

Bent or blent
In shambles
Bleeding nearer to went
Wherever brightness composed
If it com-
posted anything
Quicker than love can fly
Nearer, nearer to doom than die




Mark DuCharme is the author, most recently, of The Unfinished: Books I-VI (BlazeVOX, 2013). Other volumes of his poetry include Answer (2011) and The Sensory Cabinet (2007), also from BlazeVOX, as well as Infinity Subsections (Meeting Eyes Bindery, 2004) and Cosmopolitan Tremble (Pavement Saw, 2002). Counter Fluencies 1-20 is forthcoming as an issue of the print journal The Lune. His work appears in recent or forthcoming anthologies, including Water, Water Everywhere: Paean to a Vanishing Resource (Baksun Books & Arts, 2014), Litscapes: Collected US Writings (Steerage Press, 2015), and Poets for Living Waters: An International Response to the BP Oil Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico (forthcoming from BlazeVOX). His work has also appeared in numerous journals, among them Big Bridge, Bombay Gin, Colorado Review, Mantis, New American Writing, OR, Pallaksch Pallaksch, Shiny, Talisman, and Vanitas. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, USA.
 
 
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