Raymond Farr


The Past Is a Voice Trapped Inside a Broken Radio
1.
We are grass
Like old poems

     & tinged with
The blood of how

Many hexed roosters,
Who is this man

Entering with
His dogs now? Who

Stops every crow
Every thrush

Every sparrow
Dead in their tracks?

I mean, what is
Occult if not how

He calls us
By our names?

2.
This
Lincoln

Town Car
Nobody

Ordered
Rolls up in

The yard
To take us

To our train
& playing

With the knobs
We can feel

The voices still
Trapped inside

The Town Car’s
Broken radio

But the train
Is leaving

The depot
Without us—

Just now
The ghost of

An empty
Track



Standing Here Drunk at the Intersection of Natchez & Simple

                                                                            Minerva rides the image of a dolphin with sexual hands & smiles like a fantasy girl—Hello!—in the yellow ink well of the sun/in the black ink well of the rain.
                                                                          & I’m standing here drunk at the intersection of Natchez & Simple. & I’m convinced I’m holding the stumps of two bloody feet, the shoes still on them. & that the cure is disintegration & not the revolving door we call Phenomenon.

                                                                                                          & so I flatten perspective. I write the strange mackerel of death, the laughing Dutch Masters of despair & I’m sitting like Amsterdam in a ten minute window.

Intelligent Spaghetti

America, you left me here
Paraphrased like something else

                       I was cooking 
A big pot full of intelligent spaghetti

& the poem got up & walked out—
A waiting taxi 

I threw a handful of glass flowers
Against the wall, America

& they stuck there 
              & now gravity has how many

Thick accents?
& I wander like a stone pilgrim

Lonely with my own gravity—
Sheaf to sheaf of wheat broken-waved

& wild—& no one sleeps
But the sleeping dogs sleep like masters

                    & so I talk all night, 
Furtively, thru a hole in this glass 

Security partition—& a voice says, 
Don’t come crying to me, I’m not 

Your daddy! 
         & the lovers have stopped 

Breathing on the stairs tonight—
A pile of humid flesh, America 

As If It Were the Space Age We Lived In

The dog
Was

Shaggy
& loved

Being
Innocent

& while
Earthmen

Hit
Golf balls

Over
The bleak

Lunar
Horizon

A camera
Blinked

Back at
The blue face

Of the earth
& the dog—

Snout-deep
In a box

Of plastic
Cosmic

Straws
Some

With
Pink

Stars
(No shit!)

Some with
Blue

Rockets—
Moved

Unerringly
If a bit

Self-
Consciously—

This
Ancient

Dark
Fleck

In its
Eyes



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), Angst of the Large Transparent Man (Blue & Yellow Dog 2017), & more recently, A Deep & Abiding Frequency (Blue & Yellow Dog 2017). Raymond is editor of Blue & Yellow Dog, http://blueyellowdog.weebly.com & The Helios Mss, theheliosmss.blogspot.com
 
 
previous page     contents     next page