Mark DuCharme


A Strained Example


That’s as close to a Groucho walk as I ever get
If you wait there, then you still can’t be
The limit never ends
Please consider reaching out ’til none of us can say
Refugees tend to give fewer endorsements
Of course, I didn’t know them in their prime
The world is a cup of ideas
I’m glad I thought so
What’s your carbon alibi?
Who’s left whom you still can’t feed?
There’s a version on the internet
In a language I don’t speak
How does it feel to be so erased?
Pretend you’re better than you really are
Enamored with dead summer rumors
Sullen reprobates
I’ve already eaten, but can chew in sympathy
Blunders are the provenance of the languidly compromised
Admit you are a swimmer & the dead go wrong
Tear into your elevator tremor
Make a symphony of staccato tongues
Sometimes, the dead are all we know
When, emboldened, we throw down the caper
In a rhythm we can’t dignify with flight
Being free of each other’s world views
The sins of the past are the bills you’ve been paying
The yellow moon is free to ignore us
Awaken in a flight of shadows we can’t bear

 

Address to the Rafters


Clean up the raw flags
Held out at the fish granary
The revolt of stars
In a pennyroyal clutch

In glint amber racket samples
Evasive wind-chime melodies
& A box of lather
Lonely as a headset on a city bus

The estuaries went loco
With ambient shambling
On the seed poles & about the torment
Unwashed grass

Lonely pocket grand piano
Dust in the fine trees
You stirred
I bolted up the palace steps in winter

Looking for a mentor
A petty harbinger of false teeth
Now you are here & the wind suits me
Like a broken vase

I forgot to paste together
Before the Instamatic cloud cover went transcendental
Get off of that dust bowl
Stutter on forgotten holidays

Use the word “convivial”
In an address to the rafters
Make a meal of potato chips & good intentions
Learn to whistle the national anthem
 


Things Like Us
                                        for Filme Socialisme


I went out & stood in the sea
Did my modern eyes prevail?
Once, there was something that also was free
Like a great fleet I imagined at different times of day
Pretending to like the crack in the mirror
Until I could make my getaway
At some seaport in Vegas

You’re not archduke yet, so it’s no good weeping
I’ll figure out what to say at the symposium
& Call you back, okay?
Stevens claimed it was all fate
But he didn’t leave a forwarding address
Don’t talk about the flowers
Wear the obviating silence of selective breakthroughs
Equate cult memories with trains of thought
Passionate humor can only review

But not all the time. Something changed
Wait for the twist on the bridge I have made
Have you delivered the cliché to the showroom
& Fled through mirrors, looking cheap?
Erasure isn’t all we clamor for
I did what I tried not to do, & I
Said what I tried to have done
Sometimes, almost all there is is smoke
With autumn a bodice of regrets

The frame narrowed. No one understood a thing
In twists of thought that storms envelop
Time isn’t a complaint
Your alibi won’t cancel
Truth as jaywalking
& All the portents night reveals
I didn’t want to add another list for you to disregard
Until I’d shown you an example of Ground Zero

What haven’t I done? How haven’t I read?
Why haven’t I bled
On Saturdays, when fate is broken?
Are you ready to become part of the familiar
& Which part is the trigger
When we leap back from the flame
Tallying hate with love’s surprise
Dissonance scorpion afterlives

Were the crap merchants waiting for your endorsement?
Don’t go in when you say you don’t know
The man in the run-down building
Is willing to sell you a broken guitar
As a vanity art project
Thank the loud for the mess you have made
If you sing by others’ portmanteau adverbs
Barcelona will soon be with you
Whom do clouds trace?
To be or not
Impure as thought

Nightmares aren’t won by facile sorrow
Don’t you approve of god’s typewriter?
Sometimes, messages are stolen proverbs
The past is almost ready
Things I hardly know about
Set the future free

 

Flight
                        four cento-sonnets


            I.

for God’s sake Brando let’s leaf through evil
from the dank bottom of the slit trench, babbling
like my girl friend who married some sort of Adriatic bird
inquisitive, listless, negativistic (underlined twice)
the remarkable things that presently gave their first sign
From these strange gestures of hands that flutter like insects in the green evening
a way of transporting our entire army by wind
The flamboyant force of that zenith, spent, became in them hard and little
What was she losing so much time for?
seven thousand jugs of a magic potion made of beer and pomegranate
The whole country was aroused over these inhuman outrages
She is places where they can hear it which they wherever it is replied
Without Americanizing, snorts loudly
Gun hovers in subjective space, symbol of her own sway


            II.

The lyric poet reads a past that is a huge imagination of one form
I’ll draw from where there may not be
pleasure every new year Saturday
Who can deny, however, the tremendous influence exerted by night lodging
as it would be written or soon fall down
Tea Cake went out
In the pursuit of beauty and the husk that remains
With this system, I’ll make my fortune quickly
The actor is merely a crude empiricist
I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights
The traffic on the highway was light that day;
still she gave off an odour to the mind (for there are purely mental smells that have no reality)
Actually, the chaplain was learning to love it
behind the gauze was it a smile or a wound?
 
            III.

you look like Jerry Lewis
with a pleasant, sensitive face as pale and brittle as sandstone
“Your devotion to the past,” observed the doctor, looking at the cab metre with apprehension “is 
               perhaps like a child’s drawing
Time and again my consciousness folded the wrong way
he hadn’t literally ever been “bad”? He has not, truly, “ever,” in these weeks that I myself have lived
the importance of the thing on which your injections act
Bird of night, beast of misery, owl’s underwear!
Already from the pot of my brain the odors of food cooking had begun to rise
A star in the daytime, maybe, or the sun to shout, or even a mutter of thunder.
They wear dark colors & trudge around, all in browns & greys,
as well as numerous other devices of torture,
In which they can attract a celebration
with the gold of having nothing
Conversion is a sort of Death


            IV.

The emblematical Gun escapes its emblem from word one
that unfortunate “you’re not coming back” of hers
A part is not that it is belonging to the same plans
Thus the hour of the rounds.   Thus the one with a detour
once knowing everything it didn’t matter that everything
would have just been more people holding in
The impact of the bare soul upon the very twist of the fact which is our world about us
A Russian cannon ball breaks one of the arms of the windmill.
those who follow paths, who drop names, who recommend books
seemed to fix me, from his position
to confirm the details already supplied as to the cleverness of the vicarage pony
imparted to Mona while blurting out to me by urgent and well-paid request
shall not find. So, I say, what of the night
In an airplane there was absolutely no place in the world to go except to another part of the airplane.
a cubism of the strictly cutting


[SOURCES

Each of these sonnets contains one line or string of contiguous words from each of the following books: 
Coolidge, 88 Sonnets; Heller, Catch 22; Barnes, Nightwood; Nabokov, Lolita; James, The Turn of the Screw; 
Artaud, Selected Writings (edited by Susan Sontag, translated by Helen Weaver); Jarry, Ubu Roi 
(translated by Michael Benedikt and George E. Wellwarth); Williams, In the American Grain; Hurston, 
Their Eyes Were Watching God; Mayer, A Bernadette Mayer Reader; Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays;  
Stein, The Yale Gertrude Stein (edited by Richard Kostelanetz); Vallejo, Trilce (translated by Clayton Eshleman); 
Howe, My Emily Dickinson.]
 


Your Message Here


What price shiny
In broken rejoinders
Rustling our tongues?

I await the bare minimum
Eking out a compendium
Of awkward silence held ajar

In the fault lines of our tenderness
In commodities of understanding
I is not other than you is a syllogism

A photomosaic of contingent fault lines
Look not on paper when the shooting starts
Gather flora for a lark in your arms

Become impacted by songbirds
In the air about you no one grieves
The things that must go on

I leave them here for further study
We are there & what we are
When we are all astray

Exulting in tarmacs for my relief
Where, late, I’ll find us there
Like a reverse story problem or a set of crystals

In the end, you said you would not go
That tears may flow like prizes
In the air about that no one names

The things that must go on
I leave them here for your review
Name the animal who most fears you

Tenderly, upon redaction
While the heat blurs & is swept aside
In sensitive, grieving verse

Which diminishes the common
While the red earth cleaves
& I reassure myself that I am bony

A credit to my industry
However much the lakes have now unraveled
Tight words on a shallow page

The one who posted in the chat
Saying “great last line” clearly had
Misheard it

Heat brims with autumn’s eyes
Poetry is a syllogism
Distracted by your eyes

I hang out in the language & spell
Out my misgivings
In a flicker of upheaval

When silence heals all broken sparrows
You skim
I dabble

The word a loaded room
Birth attached to brick but amplified
I lapse in fatal voiceovers

I’ll linger in your ancient book & wither
I’ll design a city
Where birth is full as death

The poem I don’t want
Is there, its edges
Throbbing

Incited on your watch while I
Stay up
In cul-de-sacs lacking theory

Paper urchins, null surprise
The thought tank was a truck heap
I picture you there

Far from any light source
But with the freedom
To die young

I knew where I was when I said I was lost
Sometimes, I couldn’t leave
With ridiculous set pieces, in my idiom

Let me know the terror where I dwell
Undo the winter of your worst sleepover
I used to be then, but now I’m gone

There is peace
In the valley, I believe
& Ideas move like ancient trains

Lines’ meanings change
By degrees
Whether or not it lies upon the tongue

In fault lines of a tenderness
Rustled tongues
Rare mirth an obverse scrawl

Mark DuCharme’s sixth full-length book of poetry is Here, Which Is Also a Place, new from Unlikely Books. Also new in 2022 is his chapbook Scorpion Letters from Ethel. Other recent publications include his work of poet’s theater, We, the Monstrous: Script for an Unrealizable Film, published by The Operating System. His poetry has appeared widely in such venues as BlazeVOX, Blazing Stadium, Caliban Online, Colorado Review, Eratio, First Intensity, Indefinite Space, New American Writing, Noon, Otoliths, Shiny, Talisman, Unlikely Stories, Word/ for Word, and Poetics for the More-Than-Human World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary. A recipient of the Neodata Endowment in Literature and the Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry, he lives in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

 
 

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