Reading

The poet dies. Hallelujah!

Burning flamingos foam

between the brighter barracks

of our words mistaken

for flat geese in pink dress

full fabric of gestures

bringing home thousands

in box tops. What slop

gulped with electricity

in its brows called your mother

country a cow

in blue light?

Then again, we’ve drowned

in chocolate futures

finally at last alive from the sugar

sweet, sweet saunter of silence:

What’s blank and blank

is blank all over?

Whomever knocks, knocks vicious

of no answer.

Autumn Couplet

Praise, praise, the coming of Fall!

The leaves are losing their lives.

Due Time

He was the father

of four ghosts:

lilac, hyacinth, lemon seed, rose

bleached purple in the process

of age

at the site of their curling

plump presence rising

we brushed smiles

through field and glass

smooth plastic ash

hung to our mouths

in toy skulls

exciting

distant capillaries

to sweetness.

Elegy for Appetite

We asphyxiate on plates

filled and soaped out of hand.

Flash man in wayward forest.

Flash buck and berry unassumed.

Flash children bred from belly.

Night brings folly true death

and the ruse in stages…

We wait for our grand invitations

come stubborn in stubbed toes

flushed forms

the meal a perpetual giver

is to receive till our linings

leak years of mashed potato

and silver all over the kitchen.

Floor, our days are wrought

with sorrow come tickled

into soft black pillows.

Flash a dispute over oxygen.

The earth throws up its arms.

Flash man dashing at shadows.

Flash children in screams out of time.

Fog sinks bellies and eyes.

We hoard our utensils in the war.

Carpets burn from stomach acid.

The dog cowers under breath.

(this is what is left

of the table)

Photo by Auston Marek

Acrylic on sheetrock.

Finger painted excerpt from my poem “Night at the Hipster Hotel”
at 248 McKibben St., Brooklyn.

This was a spontaneous art project commissioned under the graces of
my dear friends Auston, Sam, Beddoe, and Max. Thanks for letting
me paint on your door.

My Uncle the Ghost

Some Autumn laughing
from a black bag of leaves
discarded belly of dying embers:

our fire, the scarecrow asexual
glaring over the yard
keeping its shadow
like an egg
pickled from the wind.

Poison squash spirals
blind on the table:

a hole through the moon
where your head had been.

Go Paint the World With Your Birth!

You sprawl empty footed
floating over rivers of past
remembrance finer cracks
of a city born of what mind
that placid mirror factory
of smoke and light methadone
bombs gone swirling like effigies
calling each other home. What broken
shoulders brushed up against
entrails of dignity in neon
chemical strands of ambiguity
always untied always
unfinished as the kitchen
plates we left
bastardly in the fire
before time collapsed.

Go wash your hands of this remedy!
Find yourself an origami
family or
the brighter cuts
that come from conflict
spin and puke in levied
memory way-out
of focus such camera eyes
you tongued
out of necessity:
which ecology flooded
from that coaxing? Subtle
as a metronome thrown
into space, yet still
unfathomable from here.

Haiku

You are the flowers recovered from my hands:
dreadful wasp of persimmon smoke
distant in shade of tongues.

Posts

Odd day: bad dreams and the desire to walk barefoot.
I compromise with socks, and the prayers of my driveway
are strangely medicinal. Fall is somewhere in the wind haunting my childhood. Haunting
me now? Perhaps.

Quite possibly the yellow leaves and hammock I slouched in at 14 are back. Stinking of
death and the sweat of other bodies, ravished
and reddening as wheel barrows.

Odd Day. There have been many helicopters swirling around my house lately. Yesterday,
one flew just above the trees, puce-colored. I don't know what to think about it. My first
thought was the military, then of bombs. Bombs of perfume, chocolates, moon-ash…
Maybe they'd drop cartoon anvils or swimming pools, pumpkin pie and family
heirlooms. Grandmother’s lucky worry beads lost forty years.

In confession: I worry too.

Today I roam in silence.

Strange the things we can long for: the surgical removal of the heart for some lifeless
bulb of flashing light, something electric and inviting. Often, news comes to us in dim
waves, in the frail form of laughter. I wonder if all laughter is a burrowing
and a failure. Against that                     which cannot be kept.

What else was I here for? Not sure I remember.

I want a pocket watch and a quill pen. And a vest made of moonlight to put them in.
That way, when I raise my pen to write my pocket watch will strike fondly
and everyone will dance. Even my cat Tom Waits. Even my father though sleeping.

Sleepwaltzing and laughing, together now, singing:

"I long to live far from the city..."

“Posts” is series of poems based almost entirely on posts from my blog. It is my way of engaging

with the fluidity of forum, exposure, and medium. Not to mention, conceptions of artistic “creation”, and

the supposed circles which surround them.

Peter G Res is a struggling poet living in New Jersey. His first book was published from Differentia Press, available HERE.