Poetry

By

Joe Milford

28

no one does that themselves. if anyone wipes your tears, it is only because you have no arms,

until the equipment. others have done much worse. crackpipes in $35000 cars. i just snuck beers.

i can’t beat Duchamp at chess. “I have come to the conclusion that while all chess players are artists, not all artists are chess players;” it was extremely pleasurable to nekked type this.

i am more afraid of ghost sharks than real sharks. if you have seen a ghost shark, and you drop your nail-file, then you know. the ghost sharks are the worst. they name constellations.

my sandcastle was made of severed arms. it was so sticky. i was covered with gore. when you are covered with gore, and you are the quarterback, they clean you off real good. photo-ops ensue.

the entire universe tried to fit a bikini on the infinite. it came up with an anorexic being bomb photographed into DNA. what if the bikini was a wind that blew by us and all of us thought of

flesh and freedom? there’s nothing left but to father many girls in my Lear fashion. i have no

kingdom, and so, they will thrive. there was once a snow-cone stand in my Alabama hometown.

when i drove through i saw a hammock hanging in my dead grandpa’s lean-to. no wampum.

a steady stream of ice-blue seahorses from the grate on the floor harvest dust motes and traverse the house and its littered museum. i opened the p.o. box and an arm reached through from the other side its fingers trying to grab my shirt my mail dropping to the floor. out of the burning house the ashes of our words floating across our lips making us say them again as frames.

chicken bones when we came home were arranged inexplicably in the name of our murderer.

can’t afford to cut grass lion’s heads of daffodils bring bees & snakes to us from neighbors’ yards.

the economists’ grids incinerating under flames of billowing magma; we set forth from the core.

34

when the greatest bastards of my generation howled, it only rattled cubicles. quad-life crisis.

the junky soul traverses the infinite until there is nothing left to gorge upon. Mummu. your kiss.

i threw a ramekin and broke the kitchen window angry at you. a ridiculous moment in my life.

i faithed my way into a job i lost faith in but then i found new phoenix volcanoes and said light.

i used camou to see Grunewald’s Crucifixion knowing Pollock just wanted to paint crucifixions.

you fauvist of Moreland, Georgia forests. you want good armchair. comfortable color. no faux.

massive, unfathomable drift, your fabric about all there is, my short spin here of the sphere. off.

my office, crow’s nest. blackbird alights on black streetlamp. students ride elevators to gnosis.

the key to this: what i play while i write and then fuse and hope for miracle or accident. hoping.

rapid turnover printmaker collusion cornucopia bored as hells that are macro micro tubular.

Joe Milford

Joseph Victor Milford is a Professor of English and a Georgia writer. His first collection of poems, Cracked Altimeter, was published by BlazeVox Press in 2010. He is also the host of The Joe Milford Poetry Show, where he has compiled an archive of over 300 interviews and readings with American and Canadian poets. Joe Milford also edits the poetry journal RASPUTIN and he is co-founder and poetry editor of BACKLASH PRESS.