Jared Chipkin


Hail Phi(re)

And as to that — 
 as a    poet's illicit 
          inventory —   
faded turnaround fadeaway  
   selective threading 
    of tissue: 
 
sounding board populates 
    with collect-call beacon light 
and the browned out cut kinks in place  
         (lays out)    & Werther sorrow    
 
three carded monte is equal to  
          -westerly days, tomorrow 



Oral Law

Never knew it nor 
     ever will, 
    verbs as: lacerations, 
 
  intensities against  
   defect, discount 
                  place of  
 
pride square to  
   the rumbling desire; 
 
    a mock-up after, 
 perpetuating synchronicity. 
 
Brave face illustrates  
 
           nano-compression —  
  weighting pusillanimous  
     of those  
 
kind, clueless,  
   paradisiacal coups, 
 
  before the now, now perched, 
 but now, now feeling  
 
consonant heavy — 
 
      appointment cloaked  
    prophetic,  
          
opaque, faux-legalese, 
             post-dated and 
 
           fiendish, the Gemara dictates. 



Apathy at Delos

Somewhere that divinity spark  
                  of infanticide 
               and Big Cancer 
bearing down, and the skinned forehead  
slims pink ribbon loops attest to 20,000  
cigarette 
 
      ringed chemotherapy  
marble veins a tricolor five  
syllable prognosis health obstructing 
              lodged  
                       knot  
telling off their teleological minds' 
     tumor mass has  
gravitational pull on wards 
          (neè wardens) 
 
coming next: follicle miscounts 
   forged diploma rolled   
                 tough thighbone 
to-a'dance and a'shake' and framed  
                           on rear  
official windowless wailings 
   ball all-up 
    in lumpy knit jumpers asleep kept  
         out kiss tossed ventilating 
                       optic aperture star gusts  
                                         while, at bay 
 
Black Cross registered Blue 
     Shield's suite Carib      for yet  
  another  
long hot, weekend giveaway 



Chronometer

L ike - (being "got depressed") 
  E very - (other day in) 
    A lternate - (weeks for odd number years) 
     O nce - (on a pick-a-decade) 
        A ny - (mistaken century) 
          E ach - (private millennium) 



Notes On the Ground

The one final crooked stroke dusting 
remains of traditional 
trade cloth
 
        remains, amiss before the mass
of facsimile paperback readers,
broken artifice objects
      from the country –
anthology
reject. Cult cornered classics
 
        ingested Thrace trickling (or Achaean 
in an antiquarian's reliquary), thinly placed
arthritic palm 
sized seismographs, delimited 
  in all seriousness a cerebellum's 
 
                      séance, seditious (solicitous)
palimpsest (exhumed) of brow burning, 
heartfelt – hot Xeroxed copy,
collated polysynthetic broadsheets of
 
                        weak knelled strongmen
committee screeds;
biased on sophistry, sullied from seconds…
 
      Apocrypha as jumbled composition,
outward, slipped across upward
redesign ---> astral asymptote spotting 
                              cardboard stock 
still for the tumult, four players on pillars so
to pillory whom? whatever; Fifth column 
of 
  calumny
      gesticulated indexed infirmities, 
ineffable,
   misbegotten In Memoriam
yelped, commissioned dedication
                       below a dumbstruck 
         stone city and above
a blue dark, hellacious pole of heaven.

Jared Chipkin is a longtime bookseller, has a website - www.notapoem.com.

 
 

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