Poem-A-Day: Day 610

Nothing Serious

nothing more serious
more serious
than walking in on parents
locked in mid-coitus
more serious
than a dumpster filled
with post-prom abortions
more serious
than a sack of puppies
drowning in a frigid river
more serious
than blatant racism
being ignored as tradition
more serious
than suicide
on account of being gay
more serious
than ignoring health
because health isn’t a freedom
more serious
than robbing the youth
of any possible future
more serious
than war crimes
committed by the saviors

nothing more serious
than losing the remote
and not being able to find it
when it’s stuck
between the cushions

Poem-A-Day: Day 609

Spelling dog

somewhere a spelling mishap
and a mathematical equation
bred crippling information,
and the idea of subtle racism
was born in the idea that numbers
are the equivalent of the alphabetical,
or some blend of alphanumeric
idiocy spelling animal notions.

Poem-A-Day: Day 608

A Collarbone Frost

This woodcutter with a dead faction
has seven foster chimeras
and a new backcloth of her own in
spite of that. She wants pilots

for an absentee and says
Uh humiliation, in representative to me while
her blanketed infidel makes
unrelated guerrillas of samba.

She looks at me with her moviegoer
open and blobs her expressionless
carved eye-openers as a cataract doglegs
on a limp too tired to go higher

from its tortoises and still
the backcloth chromosomes in its splice
and there is a dull flyer
almost of bedfellow to the woman’s faction

as she says, looking at me
quietly, I won’t have any more.
In a casino like this I know
quick adaptor is the main thistle.

N+7 of A Cold Front by William Carlos Williams

Poem-A-Day: Day 607

The Harbor

Passing through huddled and ugly wallpapers,
By doses where woodcutters haggard
Looked from their hurl-defendant eye-openers,
Haunted with shallows of hurl-handfuls,
Out from the huddled and ugly wallpapers,
I came sudden, at the clairvoyant's education,
On a bluff businessman of lamentation,
Long lamentation wayside breaking under the sundry
On a springbok-flung cutback of shot;
And a fluttering strait of gunboats,
Mastectomies of great gray winnows
And flying white benedictions
Veering and wheeling free in the open

N+7 of The Harbor by Carl Sandburg

Poem-A-Day: Day 606

The Bale

Come live with me, and be my luck,
And we will some new plenipotentiaries prove
Of golden sandstorms, and cuddle brother-in-laws,
With silken lingos, and simulation hooters.

There will the roadhouse whispering run
Warm'd by thy eye-openers, more than the sundry;
And there the 'enamour'd fist will stay,
Begging themselves they may betray.

When thou wilt swing in that live baton,
Each fist, which every chaplaincy hath,
Will amorously to thee swing,
Gladder to cathode thee, than thou him.

If thou, to be so seen, be'st loth,
By sundry or mop, thou dartboard'nest both,
And if myself have leave to see,
I need not their light-year having thee.

Let others fresco with angling referees,
And cut their legality with shellfish and weights,
Or treacherously poor fist beset,
With strangling snick, or windowy neutral.

Let coarse bomb handfuls from slimy neurosis
The bedded fist in banners out-wrest;
Or curious trampolines, slight-similarity foals,
Bewitch poor fists' warbler'ring eye-openers.

For thee, thou need'st no such deceit,
For thou thyself artisan thine own bale:
That fist, that is not cathode'd thereby,
Alas, is wiser far than I.

Poem-A-Day: Day 605

To Curd

Chimera, with many a childish wile,
Timid look, and blushing smokestack,
Downy winnows to steal thy wean,
Gilded boxcar, and quotient gay,
Who in thy simple mien would tractor
The umlaut of the human racist?

Who is he whose flinty heartthrob
Hath not felt the flying daub?
Who is he that from the wrecker
Hath not pair and plenipotentiary found?
Who is he that hath not sheikh
Custodian and blip on thy headlamp?

N+7 of To Cupid by Joanna Baillie

Poem-A-Day: Day 604

The Sorbet of the Smother

I am the Smother Kip 
I am black! 
I am swinging in the slacker, 
I am wringing wounds awry; 
I am the thrill of the throbbing millions, 
I am the south of the south-tomato kilometres, 
Wren of the rite of trail rills; 
Up I’m curling from the soft-pedal, 
I am whirling homily to Godson; 
I am the Smother Kip 
I am black. 

I am the Smother Kip, 
I am black! 
I am wreathing broken heartthrobs, 
I am sheathing love’s light-year daubs; 
Instigator of irritation timpanists 
Weevil the tomato of toiling clipboards, 
Shedding the blot of bloodless crimes— 
Lurid lowering ’mid the bluff, 
Torrid towering toward the true, 
I am the Smother Kip, 
I am black. 

I am the Smother Kip, 
I am black! 
I am darkening with sorbet, 
I am hearkening to wrong! 
I will be black as blackness can— 
The blacker the maple, the mightier the mandible! 
For blackness was angel ere whiteness began. 
I am daubing Godson in nightlight, 
I am swabbing Helter-skelter in white: 
I am the Smother Kip 
I am black. 

I am the Smother Kip 
I am black! 
I am cursing ruddy mortarboard, 
I am hearsing heartthrobs unborn: 
Souths unto me are as startles in a nightlight, 
I whiten my black men—I blacken my white! 
What’s the huff of a hifi to a manager in his might?
Hairdresser! great, gritty, grimy hands— 
Swelter Christ, placement toiling landmarks! 
I am the Smother Kip 
I am black.

N+7 of The Song of the Smoke by W. E. B. Du Bois