Doug Bolling


               Scree 52

                    Time then

                       I have touched there

                              Am child of all such

How words stretch through

                               Wanting a stopping place

Is it pastness lurks   out there

                  Or tomorrow

                  A tapestry of unmeasured motions

How you departed seaward as I called out for

                                      An ocean to cease

                  The vortex you said that night

                                          From the Blue Angel Bistro

           Write what you can as the moments go out with the tide

                                 Write as though words can stay

                                                                                   The madness.

 


                        Scree 54


          There had been counting through
                                                        The night

             Voices calling through the
                                                      Lengthy corridors

                How far to the oasis
                                   What price the     gift 
                                                                     Of mirage

                I watched as you gathered the grains
                                                       From a dozen     dunes
                           
                            A sifting a project against
                                                                   The chaos

                          We are driven to this
                                                     The voices say

                           0ne form of madness
                                                           Against the other

                          The human thing in its suspension
                                                           Between knowing
                                                                                        And not

                          The clocks rush on leaving behind
                                                           What might have been

                               We owe Proust so much it is said.
                                      

                                                        
  
                          Scree 57

             
                   How we become entangled in
                                                    A thickness of
                                                                                   Moments

                  I watch as you scribble faster &     faster
                                                   Across the hunger of
                                                           The leather bound     diary

                Where did we go wrong I ask of the collapsing    hours
                                                    Where the turn that
                                                                  Defined our steps

                   Perhaps it was a faulty paradigm if you         remember
                                                     A leakage in the nouns
                                                      A bruised metaphor screaming
                                                                                       In its agony

                         For once along the rain splotched Parisian    rue
                                             Gertrude Stein gathered the shards
                                                              & smothered grammar
                                                                     In a finely sewn    shawl
    
             Is it then to swim upstream among the 
                                                             Twitchings of a clock
                                                   
                                             Fleeing the past as a buoy
                                                                    A vast forgetting.





Doug Bolling’s experimental writing has appeared in Streetcake, 
BlazeVOX, Posit, Indefinite Space, and previously in Otoliths among others. 
He is working on a collection and lives in the greater Chicago zone.
 
 

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