From this is also ash

Something of a call:                  
                                           the bus questions the quality of my penmanship
                                           I did not see the coin eating mechanism
                                           proper script was always impossible the way
                                           the pen is held and drifting in diagonals like
                                           my walking patterns even on sidewalks the margins
                                           manage to get crossed, so hurt the lost arts.
                                           So be it all—no one gives—we can still get
                                           a tattoo but the plant won’t live indoors.

(Art-World
for Paul)



I am not the city rising
or people I don’t know.
A high-strung shirt
hangs in million-dollar-space—
but this—watch—wait
stunning the plain
overlay of buttons, a still silence
encroaches on the ruffles
of the arms—cuffs
give the illusion of movement—ah
yes, the hanger’s firmament
you know? It’s too much.
I won’t make it.




Splendor



Stereo is in Bill’s song now
because he called earlier.
We discussed boredom among owls
and helicopters, the strange antennas
that protrude from our backs.

What of thematic slacks
we lacked the dignity
to cover in city or plain, canyons
crept into crotches and mind.
Same to find no hidden fireflies
or electrified buzz, the pride attractive
we bounce off skulls of the earth.




Over Coffee
for Walter Phillip Glazer III



Becoming yourself, becoming
yourselves, shelves of who
God wants you to be, Joel says
We’re still at the same place
coming back, cracking our knuckles
for the perpetual preservation of music
in moments, the discovery of bodily potential.
What moves, Authenticity and Sameness,
Heidegger meets Leibniz, in shadows of truth.
They’ve bought out an old meth lab
balanced harmony with mood
in new desks, incandescents,
sorting through files of lives inconsistent:
reminiscences of conflicted speech.





From this is also ash

Common Echoes



In the debauched grammar of your mother
I found fervor, the illusive reason
for make-up, disorder, all
the wake up moments that just jaunted
the structure of cheekbones, now
Liz roams with puffed brush pastels
intense the lost word rouge, no one ever heard
of organic blush before her tears.

II

Address:

I fear the menacing aspects of eyeliner
turning brows inward, rigid, snap-free
like the promise of so many branches
we kept, smoldered in deep moss
all dolled-up in rain.
You waft in algae hues unquestioned
swamp a vibrant face in that ecology
stifled by the stars of organic mush
like hot dreams.

III

Address:

Acquiesce philosophic updrafts
from, along the service road, pot-holes forged
a schism for memory.
Bill’s schizophrenic ecology
of Homo Sapien ancestry
multifarious voices of God,
your acid

recovery among indifferent deer ‘cept
one that butted its head into our cars
parked itself onto the dock patiently,
but, in failing to hazard, submerged
into lake, got fished-out before
meeting the Susquehanna
for the first time.



IV

Spoke in our previous modes of discourse
I stole your glasses, brought them back east
through JFK, clung them to my sockets
for a reason: To recreate your shade
because they look good on me and sit well
over my vastness, thinking I left
Washington with more, of organic such
a string of texts in the more, rushing
down cuticles of brush.

V

Address:

Blow out the nose with these paints.
I do not remember her complexion.
In the phrase “you have to meet”
gone convulsing with any resurrection
or real death that ‘occurred’ there.
The spare hungry she possessed
must now be dressed-up in new quaintness
that won’t perform her beauty.
Of organic cartography,
at least not here.

face          explanation          face
face          explanation          face
face          explanation          face
face          explanation          face

Perhaps this gets you the sailboat warrior
who is buying another, and another
thinking you a bulb why bother?
The molting order needs freshening
throw it in a pan with some thyme, whole
coriander seed, tender anew
flavor profile I heard on TV.
Your voice embraced the shock
of pixilated waves
if I could screen, you into full illumination.

Of organic disintegration,
we’ve become Art.


(Spring Cleaning)



When burn forms
I will tell you:
I’m not giving you my image.
(I keep my souls in little books
of poems this is compost—
all eggshells and rind)

There is so much clean-up
to be done—maybe—later
thinking set to warm scraping,
rhythmic sheddings are really
us and this is shameful,
Sam claims, insisting lack
of verbiage for cleanliness.

When we have dressed for days
in the fragrant stock
of what has been devoured,
developed, when we really let
ourselves go with this.
Good Morning. Thank you.

Is there anything—um
you could check, well,
no. It doesn’t matter—
does it?




Peter G Res is an MFA student at the low-residency program in poetry at New England College. He is a self-proclaimed anti-academic who waxes philosophical in New Jersey, with his dog.