Mark DuCharme


Poem without a Reveal


The original got away from me
A novel in decay
In whatever form or fate we’re still allowed

Contemptuous of being
In all the right places
Admit you breathe

In others’ plastic
To do, if not the right
Then the most expedient thing

The child went off the edge
You said you would
It wasn’t soon

The land could hold
Surfaces viable
To human intervention

In a dream
Another’s scrawl
Pale animal artifacts

Effect night barricades
Not this land, but another
He who hides

Becomes a whisper
Beauty a sumptuous threshing
State-enforced ridicule

Through dark entanglements
With all of the ceasefires crossed out
A chuffing off of low ideals

Treble-ware for the fainthearted
The car ran into a tree
It wasn’t essence

Lit, but body
In the wrong key
Signing off
 


Total Oliver Hardy


I think there was nothing
I was thinking of writing
But now I don’t know
What to do

When nothing is anywhere
As it was before
Until we’re all flawed
Beings

Who lend
Rough discourse to
False supplicants, when dreams
Are few

With nowhere left to hide
In grace of the very last line

 

Sorry, but I Have to Type This Now


Truth isn’t what you remember
In hazmat laughter

Tend to the munificence
Of a torture that loses you

Before the tweed’s unraveled
In an ambient memory of Das Kapital
Transverse like all the money you’ve made

By code or virtue
Or anything else unfamiliar

In search of lost form 



Thing


The thing is all right here—
Cross your mouth out

Cut to the work of a past recon-
structed
So you’ll have to read it fast

Light not yet anything
To sleep in tight

Spaces, bricolages
Woven under a unifying moon

The thing is night-borne stillness
A crossed-out youth, under fatal

Distractions
Signifying breath, the poem’s reach

To drench us all in flight—
Drowned by upturned tongues
 


After the Provocateur’s Ghost Double


Mooncrushed debris
Crowds of riveters
Incarnation blossoms spasming

Can you fake a history of
Lapsed vowels?
Truth always carries a price

You first— I’ll be watching
Boomtown restaurants where nosedives
Grow slyly dark

To wear dark umber in your hair
While deleting the history
Of the word ‘now’

What’s left grows somewhat
Impulsive, while you
Fumble with the keys

Don’t wait for evening’s    jangles to
Fear the docent    in your loom
Alive, like yesterday’s pop traffic
 
Polluted content streams



The Truth in Lost Forms


Replete practical night talk:
An engine upon which to disbelieve

The whoosh of the newly formed blue
Smudge in your reading copier

The tune is glass fastened to your tongue
With events in the wrong order

In tongues of lunar hue
Spring doesn’t have much to do

Where are you? I’ve missed
The deserted army surplus store

Vote here, in quick sunburn
The world’s not yet in animal form

Or a monster of replete allure
Solve an engine for the time remaining

Set your watch to zero
In the past’s dead youth

Love is the love of the love you keep
Before I go to sleep

Weep then & form tentative
Conclusions

A false history of the truth in lost forms
Is youth in the making

Like a clod on Easy Street
While two tiny dogs bark

Being walked, under rain-
threatening skies
 


Pucker Up & Stumble


A blank page nobody knows
Death of the interior
Leave

The red octave is no lower
Eat your peas
Daylight unlike it slips & triggers

Red fog
The length of rain
Above or under the juniper trestles

A bright knob is where I’ll be
A world in burnt-out shimmers
Lucky nails

At the end of the window you don’t expect anything
Naturally, their tongues—
A few mismatched reveries

A torsion once before you let it flicker
In the sublime mismatch
A bird is not a blur except

To such as nurture effigies
Quail prophets
Reduced care lost monuments

Queued in bigger lunacy
Malware a climactic edifice
Face samples where you grieve

Tomorrow is a long way down
Identikit pimples
A length of balcony (baloney)

What to know about the sun
Actual orange damage
Bent over meth slips

Encaustic loom dapples
Ding a flaunt elder
Botched sump retorts

All noon a straw heat
Tame geese
Make a glissando of your gateway

With noon a May whistling
Rorschach eyes
The glee is out to bevel

Whose triggers would be zithers
Whose regimen is keep
Wholly up to bear this out

Return returns happy night forward
A tin hamper
Which crows binge on in faint, erotic alchemy

 

Pages Fraught with Birds


In point of shadows, lest we plunge
Lucid, but I’m still not sure

That hornet is not desultorily awake in broken video
Noon, a clutch in winter’s thinness

What land is this, you still don’t bear
& How will you pay it back

In taken space
In songs denuded, filling up the air?




                                    The world is often gray—
                                    Day moves

                                    West— a failed rendezvous
                                    With starlings;

                                    Examine flight—
                                    Even silence won’t install

                                    Fate,
                                    Haggard




Indigo tremors—
Places with the world at large

I’ve got a rash of unsung subplots—
A weight I can’t overstay

Perhaps, by studying lost films, burnt records—
What land is this that sets us up?—

Places far from love’s
Lost care




                                    The truth’s what was—
                                    Old crayons work

                                    What land is this, that
                                    We have failed

                                    Being part of the real
                                    In the sea of night’s forms?




Did you squander the sum of love’s care?
Did you deface sunflowers’ shadows in the rain?

Did you race toward the place of forgotten backroads?
Did you eradicate the gazes of windflower eyes?

Tune is night’s catch, a stolen verb
A hubbub of practical noise leaked from the prow of a ship

I know how you feel, but it does no good
To promenade on avenues, disgorged by reckless teeming

The page is only as new as you are
Things correspond with themselves on the shimmer

Of nomenclature, like arbitrary demagogues thrust out on diving boards
Who rustle with a feckless zeal. Meanwhile

Hurt traces the need for startups with a messianic glee
Instead of inventing a culture with room enough for everyone

Where shadows forge at the root of an almost predatory desire
Tune out not, when the stakes are true

Rome wasn’t built in a vacuum— in a rhythm of lost songs
That no one’s even earned




                                    In the tune of night’s speech
                                    I can only take on
                                    A formal cry or dream-state

                                    I am never woken from—
                                    To make sensate lost travelers
                                    Almost feel safe

                                    Adrift from liminal
                                    State-funded hair
                                    But with reckless danger to the ear

                                    To tune & go
                                    As if you didn’t
                                    Know where I’ll still
                                    (Not) be—

                                    Like drifts of mute birds
                                    Under a measure—
                                    An ulterior future,
                                    A fate no one cures

Mark DuCharme’s sixth full-length book of poetry is Here, Which Is Also a Place, new from Unlikely Books. Also new 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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