Mark DuCharme

Hidden


Trundled voiceovers    smote the brute
Paintball vendettas—
        Too large a charge
For men in shorts, wedged into 
Cut glass skies
            (Accoutrements smoldering)

§

Never there was that does not mean
Bowling pin landing patterns
A cursive bricolage

If you wait before the rain the features
Will crumple like parched
        Sandals in winter

Or a seizure in tinctures—
Plunking all
        That random parrots
    Dream

§

The eye completely terrorized
In cities of lost children
    Without being spoke-\
                                         n completely
    Without being broke-/

Almost as if we weren’t
    Outright when
        Ghosts in partial ruin—
            The unburdened night set free

§

Undead as before
Yes, in a minute
A minute we don’t own

In the heat unstill yet still
Infected by the sky’s

Night rhythms neither
            Hungry nor
                        Revealed

§

In windows of things we know not what we
Cling to—

        Bones in the throat indigo flutter

Flicked rote or wrought        diamonds off
        Landing patterns
In a place where the moon was put back

Intermittent whistler        time-stamp sepals
A looser architecture could displace

        An opening under all taut worlds

Remembrance twists with words torn off

§

You don’t know the weight of the hidden
Yearning to be seen

Yearning to tear off                the page—
        The ghosted & unequal

The sky is lost to                    private signs—
    Pirate signs that energize
        The few, in ghostly rain

Piracy & intimacy are not so different, you know

        Ghosts, in partial
                Harbors

    Inflected with false tongues— the stale

        Kindled bodies that night also tries to

                            Hide



Thousands Blink Outside


About what towns were they dead in wonder
Waiting for fresh neon to survive

Awake as before, Conquistador
Or someone else, who calls me Bubbles

In the next scene, there’s a rare feeling
Thousands blink outside

Don’t go away
Develop laughing pneumonia

Only hashtags fail
When evening slurs

The root square, or
All instructions for our breath & cure

Birth’s scrim, uneven vinyl—
Unknown shudders, vanished strides



Almost Not Like Pages Full of Night


                I.                            (after JML)
Almost light, but triggered
    In the event lush timing
        Already not light, but a harbinger
            Of some days or useless night

Uselessness we already paid for
    Inventing the smoke & the rope   of light pouring
From our shallow cares, which are not bright
        Are dark, in fact, though we invent
                        Stages full of light


                II.
Light, this earth to be delivered
The child will bring no joy (I wish
                    I hadn’t 
            Said that)
        Light ripples over
    Us—
Plumelight impacted, of night’s dark thinking
    The dark in the play of the letters of
        Your name—
            Bright crystal tears—
The earth burns, & all we fear
    Are the cares we profess in autumn’s brittle-
                            ness

    C               L
      l                e
       o               a
         a               f
           k               -
                              c
              o                r
                f                u
                                    s
                    l                 t
                      i                 e
                        g                d
                          h
                             t

Attentive to the things of life & earth
    That everything revolves around, & we
        In light, the color of
            Plum-stippled incre-
                    ments,
                        Proceed—


                III.
The page we stained    of broken phones
Lips pulped with leaves’    colors
Longing for birth    in the arms of the trees
Is nothing the sun hasn’t    already seen

The stun of the glare in the    evening’s breath
Is open if you    hadn’t flown
Away late in amber    as mouths’ dark colors
As sun to the flesh    flush with night    flush with night


                IV.
Innate cave joy
    In compline expositions
To see them there    to see them
        Gadding

Awake to the cave    of the book that remains
    In brute song    leans into
Allure
        Yet even the complicit cricket

Gleans it
    A jaded two-fer
Plunk balcony    addled rumors
        Amid the grace    to start a case

Lean factions
    Plunk seasons    ivy liens
A dram of care is all    that’s there
        However fast this brittle life runs through it

Up (or out of) El Shiraz
    In the note at the end of a rumor
Rote punk schooners
        Band name alchemy    daylight fissure keeper

Somehow it’s red
    As a pronto Mercurio
Daisychain chained alto scooter
        In the proof of the truth that you missed it

Artaud told you
    Not to squint
Blent night ink bucket
        Night rumble allure

Archy as in what might burn
    The page torn with bees
Engine rot, engine rot
       Lipstick

Level, when alone    with auburn
    Timing
Lips a sodden glossary
        Frightening elk rhythms

Blue mantis ilk thyme
    Jolly polo
The rail isn’t set yet
        The rail isn’t set

Whose ilk? Cruise later
    Angled hair almost grossly
Lava romance animal channel
        Another charade

Regret normal
    Lapel crozier suitcase
Lave witness validation rerock claims
        Like the diamonds in her thighs

Rend a cow, rend a cow (suitcase)
    Rent windward leg anthems
Subjective checkered wicker    vinyl mirage
        Mirage plaid        bad tanning

Your taste for the bland
    Is not so grand
Remember the rest of            us
        (The rust of cyan         birds

                Instilled like swaying

                            Trees—

Mark DuCharme’s recent books of poetry include We, the Monstrous: Script for an Unrealizable Film (The Operating System, 2018), The Unfinished: Books I-VI (BlazeVox, 2013) and Answer (BlazeVox, 2011). Counter Fluencies 1-20 appeared as part of the print journal The Lune (2017), and other recent work is in Caliban Online, Colorado Review, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, Ethel, Human Repair Kit, New American Writing, Unlikely Stories, Word for/Word and Noon: An Anthology of Short Poems (Isobar Press, 2019). He lives in Boulder, Colorado.
 
 
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