New work

http://www.ditchpoetry.com/connorstratman2.htm

Asylum

In so many words

you live up to your name.

Contrary lines border the heart

of this darkening discovered dusk.

And what, if I’m to blame you,

should I pack for the road?

Touch

Eros and old wounds

gather on this cigarette

butt-laden balcony

***

Someone told

me to

calm down

Love Poem

please don’t

make me kiss you

Beginning with a line from Leonard Cohen

From this broken hill

there was made a choice.

You’ve spilled chilled spirits

onto the dirt inferno

that’s built around me for years. 

Saklas

Sing, fool, sing to me,

the shadow of the centrifugal

serpent. Angel to angel,

faceless face to form

and space, come with the fire

to swing the sphere into focus.

If in our song, you’ll permit

a field to crumble into weeds,

may the oil burn at midnight

as well as at the bloody sunrise.

By then, our shirts will be dry

and the cities will call to us

in shipless drowning gestures.

They’ll know then the fixtures

were never fixed nor stern.

Your motion is your negative

gorgeous twin vision of night.

For me, the moon unhinges

on the brink of demonic dispute,

something for my six lost sons

to pull towards their barren chests. 

You Know My Name In Secret

You know my name in secret. Upon the mountain,

you called as a single dove; above all else; all burnt

with flares in your feathers. Spare my eyes, I cried,

but don’t let me look away. The blossoming clouds

sent you away. Your voice echoed through the rocks,

and my short tale ended in fear, a wretching cough

for the time in the gaping, crumbling sediment.

Then a demon shook me from sleep, his eyes

red and human, his body in the armadillo’s

shape, crawling towards me with a deafening hiss.

Almost a voice, I yelped awake and ran to check

the locks. The dead meat of the fridge was gone

by morning after I fed the hounds and sucked

down alprazolam as if that will halt a vision.

A new bird crept on the branch when sunrise

came, but I refused to look. Leaving the door

unlocked, I jumped the train with unholy wine,

hiding in a corridor deciding what crumbles:

buildings or atmospheres? Who are you?

I hear a smoking voice pawing at the door,

as if my own baptism would bring quenching

fire that no one but my fellow passengers

could see. Come near, bring water to worship,

whiskey to emulsify the acids in your knees.

Stay for the rockets on this unnamable holiday.  

Cage

body is a cage and so it’s so

that all who descend to earth

find a speck of diamond

in their dusted arms

body is a crevice for

the eye that does not see

but knows where to be shut

to wait for the speechless All

Pneumatic Sandcastle

Thrill in exalts: a child climbs on the curving statue.

Upon the urns of the sand, a kite birds away

from the crowd’s hands. Mother Sophia smiles

at the paperbacks burning in the sun along rocks.

Blister, spirit. Call my legs to your front door,

towards the shipwrecks of passed sins and say,

“Take this, some of you, and know it. This is my

breath, which is flowing for all of you today.”  

All Steps Towards a Spiral Path

Of a ladder that descends

            into a Musikal book

is bound to the Sea that pulls me

Generated into the flight of blue jays

What great appointment for the age

Torn             and green            they play with

    themselves            while their apostles

push for an undefined hierarchy

of pain            O sister of the Wise

tired slurps of the Euphrates

           

I give time to you, in time

Fractured Hymn, #1

The shadow, Samael,

loomed over my mirror

and sought

my loins for replacement

I guzzled glasses

of the beast

It was then these

scriptures emanated

into a sophic prison:

“Obscured Apnoia,

steer clear of darkness,

find self-generated Words

so that the Paraklete

my penetrate us,

reach for us within

whatever Chaos

we rule.”

Flood

the flatfaced apocalypse sneaks upon our heroes

while they eat a modest meal of figs and club soda

flood, lake Michigan, bring the bay to a stop

and see your threadbare crowds at a standstill

the test has to be bodies drained patients

a kind of sample group that gives thought

less blood and we are still right here

waiting to be fed any sort of process meat

then no love is empty no touch is meaning

less no kiss is left without a true smell

right but look at the hemispheres there’s

a way to see yourself alone with stars 

Addition

hello [1]

come in [2]

sit down [3]

would you like a drink [4]

---

[1] A greeting

[2] An invitation

[3] A command

[4] A question following a command 

Earth Forms

Good, he says, to be

here with you all

tonight             I’m

here to discuss

hieroglyphics

with you             dogs

often see signs

in the grass

circular            they

describe them

with cries of

derisive             talk

explosively

selling nighttime

sonatas                        hark

to loving stones

to altered tracks

to destruct            but

there is not one

of you who don’t

also feel            shrine

Stuck

Sticking close to the wall. Day drags to snapping still stones. Welcome, Vertigo.

Winter canon

the wolf is my painting

the wolf makes my accusations

the wolf makes my midday meal

the wolf cleans my bedroom

the wolf lights my gnostic candle

the wolf crumbles my affect

the wolf crushes my mandolin

the wolf builds my empty parlor

the wolf counts my half-hours

the wolf dreams of my couch

the wolf burns my kitchen

the wolf hosts my fish frys

the wolf holds my teeth in a cup

the wolf asks about American sadness

the wolf prints my ticket to Peru

the wolf shines my filmy moonlight

the wolf stages a mocked march  

the wolf eats my apple in the field

the wolf bums my smokes to strangers

there it was not

There was a painting in the room I woke up in. A guest was just leaving but I didn’t follow them. I licked the wall and then realism went out the window. 

while cutting a curtain

I drank chocolate
milk this morning
while watching lake
ashes spray against
your window

rising

when she called
substance and
feet blew

away

an antifesto

Not attempted this in awhile, and my awareness of the internet's illimitable expansion and mixture of timespace leaves me at the mercy of unforeseen consequences. Writing is the distance between repulsion and compulsion, a cry from the throat and pared calculation of affect. The tension for the writer is the balancing act of freedom and constraint. Spirits wane, forms appear, power drains and regenerates.

So, perhaps this blog is an exercise in drains and regeneration. Studies in dissociation, you might call them. Whether poem, prose, photograph, aphorism, all trails between the real and unreal--now a shifting architecture for all to see.

This is an antifesto. Not a series of thoughts or artifacts, but the acute collision between object, sense, word, and the continuum of action between them.

If a voice, then a company of shifting presences and absences.

If a presence, then an unwilling misrepresentation. Who's there?

If an absence, then a vision of presence. Who's not there?

And who should be?