all poets welcome!

HOW TO BECOME A CONTRIBUTOR:

Just send an email with "join san juan poets" in the subject line to terriclark@centurylink.net

We will reply with an invitation to join the blog!





Monday, September 30, 2013

I wonder how much of the sun has already been used?
mandatory optimism
as usual
willful ignorance
maintained by a pinhead lobby
of invisible deities
they are busy being happily wounded together
how did you know I would ask that?
propinquity breeds objectivity
the sun is over the roof
but you wouldn’t know it
by the foot prints filling up steadily with black snow
*
dissidents are tortured back into dust
in the name of our valuables
it’s very hard to describe hellfire
sucking the oxygen out of the air
or symbiotic parasites taxing our hallucinations
driving us into their arms
in full knowledge of the default
immoral moment with a full stomach
full of fresh air
the mere poetics of our dubious limits
wobble the wheelchair-paradigm digging its teeth
into gravity
I stack your pancakes on columns of nickles
Oh beautiful feeling that makes everything more beautiful!
*

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

He's Dead


I’m dying to weep for Francis Sweeney,
dead in his eighties, a little too young
   for me, I’m hoping for a longer stint
on earth; lot’s to do ‘fore the last dog’s hung.
   It’s a life of oglemoon and sunsquint
         into the dark finis
manufacturing that aesthetic thrill,
   so long as it doesn’t pay you dim sum
   at all. It’s only ripe as freedom,
a door you open into a deep hill.

A drop in the salmon ladder really;
what do you reckon in earthly years?
   O, rare fertile roe in my wake when I rowed
the fishful of dreams unweepable tears
   to your little son over the charred road,
         which looms ungenteely.
Just beyond where the voltage sags the clay,
   someone holds a picture of your mother.
   ―This is all that’s left, they say. But smother
any concern, for you are well on your way.
  
At my deposition, Fran, you sported      
a bow tie! Some legal types, suing for you.
   I never did learn how it all turned out.
We went on to live as if this life were new;
   I put the melancholy ash to rout
         but it merely loitered
between our plots of brain material.
   There must have been a hole in your fabric
   the shape of his last moments, a rubric                         
I repeat, now that you’re ethereal.

My elegy for the elder binding
tie makes glaring the strangeness of my truth,
   a thing received of each sole emptiness.
My breath and selfish ways have gone aloof,
   so must it be, the very thing you bless―
         This is the last finding.
Somewhere in a library, bowdlerized,
   because they’re each one’s untouchable quinx,
   are books printed in invisible inks,
weightless tomes, imperfectly realized.

Somehow this has to do with Solipsism
because the very Greeks of knowledge light
   up like little planets going round me
when I catch them in my sundance flashfright.
   Which is to cry “I’m buried here, Sweeney,
         under a head schism."
I can wait with dignity forever
   if it means the non-believer suffers
grace as it pours it’s hail on strange, never
   to know for certain if it will snuff hers.