Keith Higginbotham

Beat

St. Cather's lawn skull returning king money turpentine;
sun racketing wastebaskets the lives battered
within the hall aromatic, central steaming listening on lost wake
benzedrine and you are the empty night; it’s winter in Jersey.
The migraine awakes high burdens and knees its birdcalls.

Dawn is the impulse to cross poverty in the Bronx.
Farms trees and roof thickets where union skeletons gloss into
dark dreams drank platonic intoxication windows,
ferry of hell nightmares the heaven smell among hours;
idling chipping green universities who float again the

alcohol the incomparable lightning followed light all the way
to Paterson, big clean burning Paterson illuminating starry
lights of dungarees and drugs and hush the sea-lion land
that ran around the ashcan of wilderness naked, cooked
skin dragging a piano breathing lonesome hysterical freeway.

Space Factory

bag of twisted eyes
                a grass ballet
on a chair back black
meteors of the future
down on a deacon’s plate
                homemade road-
sides murder the narratives
through the wall
of television
                sleeves of teenage
soldiers junk the hotel
all in a dinner theater
set underwater



Two Mirrors

dwindling apple trenches relief crossing, gotta have expressions, nothingness
of birthplace, nonetheless a bed gestures by, a bed upon
the gestures, departing, eating silence as, silence as some other in, a scorched
tableaux, blond with policies, the handsome one yes

scratch the sulking dissertation, stone the known, pave wooden pavements,
erase the guard, guard erased, ensemble sentence drifts, gunshot
topography, old stars on the scaffold, ditto the tournaments, motions
the scrolls, flakes off the unwrapped artifact, buttons the rail

Keith Higginbotham's publications include Grace Notes (illustrator) (Unknown Press), Calibration (Argotist eBooks), Theme From Next Date (Ten Pages Press), Prosaic Suburban Commercial (E∙ratio Editions), and Carrying the Air on a Stick (The Runaway Spoon Press). He lives in South Carolina.
 
 
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