Raymond Farr



                                             R. Mutt Strikes Again

She reads Ben Mirov’s Ghost Machine to me
& while I’m sleeping I feel a bird’s wings working

The machinery of light & shadow at my window

The horizon has a clock’s shapeless hands tonight
& the ghost of unexpected money appears out of nowhere

& then we’re off somewhere & making shadows out of metaphors

Is what a poet does while turning a corner in a hurry
It’s all about the lag of a single highway out into daylight, she says.

& how experience is just a big guilt & innocence machine—

A red shift psychedelically into Upside Down/Mushroom Room
& the mind is just a 3-legged dog, always wandering off

Like the last line of a poem. & you know how light

Can only exist in a room with no doors & no windows, right?
& how growing angry in the orchard every Sunday we see

Reasons for patterns in disparate things? I mean, I never

Considered a urinal a great piece of art, she says
& so I never suspected I would love one this much



                                             The Eternal Gesture of a Sentence

& from the murmuring cyclone of her poses—
& from the blatant pertussis of her rapacious language—

& from the windmill of her hyperbole—
The eternal gesture of a sentence—“I hate the living!”

& so we linger at the dog track of our suffering
Our oversized foam-novelty-finger finger is one of many

Still raised antagonistically at the stadium
& there’s nothing worth dying for archived at www.ghostboys.com

But what about love in the scarlet & orange womb
Of a burning apartment building?

What about dry fucking while watching fish in the aquarium?!
The point, she says, is never “plaid” & then “tree bark” &

“Mechanical syringe” etc, but the wasteland’s little red
Tricycle of death wheeling up—dark pages of a dark history

Jamming its axle with imaginary power
Zeitgeist is the point, she says, it is multiple Tweets

Flooding our inboxes like so much digital gravy
It’s all about the man who says he can’t go on like this

& how we’re fraught with perception, indigestion, cohesion…
                                    & I’m back at her place & I’m

Setting up her new printer & I’m dressed in 10 pounds
Of animal skins—camels & broad-backed he-men—

The smell of offal in the baby’s crib
& I love you! I hate you! What is this place?!



                                             An Object Where a Subject Used to Be

A man’s actions
Are scams of

Infinite variations—
This squint of

Imminent wreckage
Into the teeth of

The known &
The unknown things

We call art
Like whatever a

First step towards
Working the big room

Should feel like—
My words are

Our words, he says
           & we’re

Driving like snails
On Highway 200

She says, a cup
Stained red & the

sky at my door…
& we’re sharing

These moments
Intensely—

This exaggerated
Emptiness




Raymond Farr is author of Ecstatic/.of facts (Otoliths 2011), & Writing What For? across the Mourning Sky (Blue & Yellow Dog 2012), sic transit—“g” (Blue & Yellow Dog 2012, 2016), Poetry in the Age of Zero Grav (Blue & Yellow Dog 2015), & more recently, Angst of the Large Transparent Man (Blue & Yellow Dog 2017).

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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