EVERYTHING REMAINS OPAQUE
This email I send too late to be received
And read, but faith I have, its electronic
Existences in the atmosphere will find
My gift, the Donnean bright bracelet now
Around your wrist bone, once covered
With pale olive voluptuous skin and sad.
Your last letter whined about the progress
On your scenario for a film noir
About hitchhikers who wore wristwatches
Which told time by diamonds instead
Of Arabic numbers. I recall how we spent
Our time reading travel folders, never
Went any place except shopping malls
And our solitudes. What I remember
Most of all, the last day we were together,
It ended with an Eloitean whimper
And after whimpers, whiskey--the damp day
We buried the blurred, the blotched, the beautiful
Beneath a grave yard, gray leaves piled between
Snarls, shadows of an ancient oak's roots,
Half above ground and half underground,
Touched an underground stream's polite lips.
After a long passage of time what we buried
Is still buried there. I never retuned to dig.
You went to Austria, to see if strangers
Still lived by the myths of life forces, failed.
You celebrated your failure with a razor blade
Slicing open the exquisite curves of your stomach.
Tomorrow I go to the shopping mall
To buy a shovel, or a blind fold.
DER SCHREIN DES NICHTS
Although no car I have,
Every morning upon awakening
My aubade is putting
My bare foot on the accelerator,
Pushing the petal to the floor.
I speed by a Georgia bedspread factory,
Where farm girls rearranged
And tattooed by television
Machine stitch the tails of peacocks
On seesaw pale green
Aristocratic geometric equilateral triangles.
One eccentric
Stitched on a sparrow, was
Fired to save capitalism.
Wisteria is outside my window,
Although it is not.
When the wind increases its acceleration,
The wisteria's thick, ancient stems taps
My window pane,
Although there is no wisteria.
My fingers on the white sheet,
The tabula rasa, look like frost.
The sun, the busy old sun, intrudes,
Walks through my window glass
To shine and make my fingers
Disappear.
THE REAL IS ALWAYS MISSING
Plunder rooms
Always
Have locked doors.
Keys
Can never be found.
The window panes are painted an opaque
Gold,
When sun shines gold blinds the eyes.
At nights, the windows are mirrors.
A petty poet, a professor, without poetic talent,
Sits on a white sofa in the living room, talks
About how famous he is. He is alone,
All the others have gone into bedrooms.
She is far away, her skin like stained glass,
Stained by walnuts.
But she is now wiping
Up coca stains from a white oilcloth in a kitchen.
Her husband is breakfast dreaming about St. Zita,
He recalls seeing through the coffin glass
The etched décor on her silver face, the white
Lace collar, yellowing, or her black wedding dress.
Her eyes are jade, Chinese, Ming dynasty,
So I try to think of happy-sad Dogen watching
A dot of moonlight reflected on a dew drop,
But I think of her eyelash, a speck, wrapped
Around with white velvet, now is a dusty
Bureau drawer in the locked plunder room.
A HALLUCINATORY GHOSTLY ETUDE
Always being,
Even when close.
Face to face,
Always being
Put in pocketbooks
Or back pockets.
I think of and envy
The depressed,
For the depressed
Are being caressed
By snow.
Snow can love.
This morning,
On a high step ladder,
I tacked stars,
Stars shaped
Like the precious
Wrinkles
On each side
Of your dark eyes,
On my ceiling,
But at night
When I turned on the lights,
The ceiling was blank.
Snow can love,
Snow has soft arms
That can hug.
I NEVER GRASP MY OWN GRASPING
The polyrhymic, paralipsis,
Parataxis
Of her facial gestures
Initiated
My many guesses
At what she is communicating.
My past, the beauty of alleys,
The ugliness
Of the mowed grass front yard,
Always
Defamiliarizes for me the present.
The irregular rhyme of her eyelashes,
Their quiver, their stasis
Philosophically disconcerts,
Leaves me in bepuzzlement.
Her face, the perfect oval
When oral, vivacious, emphatic, verbose,
Even loquacious
Is to me like listening to silence.
I want sound, I feel more lonely,
More isolated, feel like a migratory
Bird
Who has landed in the wrong location.
SYMPOSIUM (After Plato)
A beige bowler hat he wore.
He believed his birth
An immaculate conception,
Like Hercules and Athena;
He stepped, fully grown-up.
Out of a Magritte painting,
Came alive as did Galatea
When her ivory was kissed
And caressed by Pygmalion,
Who when only partially narcotized
When fondling cold ivory,
Prayed to Aphrodite to
Turn solidity into softness,
The unpliable into flesh.
My acquaintance appeared
At the al fresco café
As a mirage, he was inside agua.
As a scrap of wallpaper
Torn from a living room wall,
Tossed into a turbulent stream,
But his imperfections kept him
From being turned over and over,
Bestowed to him the illusion
He was in control,
Was swimming, an exhibitionist,
During the butterfly breast stroke.
He was looking for stimulants
With a special type of veneers,
But he had veered,
And now was vexed.
He sensed he had come
To the wrong place.
On the table was a tiny
Green empty basket tied
With a green ribbon,
And nothing else.
He spoke, in his flag
Manner, a mannerism
Of subtraction and division,
He spoke as through
A bandana, gaucho-styled,
As if we were ink,
Declaring he was in love.
She had a pierced tongue,
A globe of gold,
Cut through the taste buds’
Microscopic hairs, the micovilli.
She had read Leopold von
Sacher-Masoch’s Venus In Furs,
Knew what to do.
Each of their love encounters
Started with a happy
Ending, without a middle,
Or a beginning. His love
Was anti-Horatian, it was
Hormones and a horizon.
A savant, a renown
Polo player and authority
On Teresa of Avila, had just
Finished his fourth glass
Of vodka. He was the
Arriviste’ best friend,
They had met in a jail cell
After a drug bust
On the college campus,
Scowled and said,
“You are no different,
For you are like all slave mentalities,
You are incapable of love.
You are incapable
Of loving the other.
Any form of alterity
Is alien to your mental disposition.
Your amour propre
Is the alcoholic pat
To smooth the fireworks
Of your wounds.
You do not love her,
In spite of her having a pierced tongue,
And literary erudition.
I know she has read
The complete diaries
Of Anais Ninn.
I have listened to you
Talk about her for hours.
How she looks when she
Wears white-gold hair wig.
You do not love her,
For you consider her a fact,
There are no facts, only
Interpretations, thus your
Considering her a fact,
Means she is an illusion,
All facts are illusions.
We believe these illusions
To be facts to
Flatter our weak egos.
We are gullible enough
To believe we have knowledge.
You don’t love her, but
Love an illusion of her.
You should read Stendhal
On crystallization and become
One of the happy few.
As the Heisenberg principle
Declares the act of observing
Changes what is observed.
You consider her a fact
Freed from your observation,
Thus you love an illusion.
Everybody now seems
To consider what they claim
To love is a fact, and thus
Authentic love has disappeared
From our 21st century.
You can only love according
The Heisenberg principle.”
The newcomer balled up his
Fist, answered his best friend’s
Assertions by with a strong blow
Hitting directly on the mouth.
His teeth fell into the vodka.
Duane Locke now lives in rural Lakeland by an ancient oak, an underground stream, and two ospreys. E mail: duanelocke@gmail.com.
He, when not writing poems, devotes his hours to photographing what he calls "The sacred," insects--spiders, leafhoppers, cotton strainers, dragonflies, etc, and studying postmodern philosophy, favorites Nietzsche and Heidegger.
He has at August, 2008, 5, 996 poems published in print magazines and e zines. None of the poems were self published or subsidized. 4 more and he will have 6,000 published. Forthcoming book, YANG CHU'S POEMS, has over 250 poems not yet published which will bring his total published poems to about 6,250.
He is also a photographer of art photos, intuitive expressions based on the neural-emotive experience derived from his past life that forms the present when it becomes shaped colors. Has had 319 art photos published on internet, print magazines, and used as book covers.
He is in Who's Who In America (Marquis). More information found on internet, click "Duane Locke" on "Google"
Read more work from Duane Locke.
