10-07-2013, 04:51 AM
A barcode stares at me,
like the-bit-too-neatly sewn eyes of a gorgon,
from an otherwise decently illustrated book.
I bought it for five bucks at the newly opened
Green Book Shop out on West Main.
The men that sold it to me,
with their computers,
couldn't tell me when it was written
or who it's by.
There are eyes in the book,
though they don't look back at me
like some pre-mad philosopher's abysmal monsters,
or a no less slanted devil's book of law.
A child could have drawn these eyes,
and practically a child has
drawn something worth
as much as any barcode edition tome.
Crayon marks tell me
this book is someone else's, it belongs to Susie Robinson,
or did, when she was apparently no more than
six or seven years old.
Not very old since it's a book with a barcode;
but there's something ancient in the drawings,
despite the copies and the paper in the printing.
The writing is a slow burn,
it grows on you like a drug or dream purchased potion
in those things I thought only I wrote in the burned down
library of my brain.
It's a physical writing that comes through
the glossy paper; an old
witchscratch handwritten book of shadows.
It drops into and cracks your stomach,
sending corrupted mind blood back to your head.
It starts with how one day
the wrinkled skin at the joints of the fingers
came unsealed, and eyes opened.
Soon this was the only way to see,
since it appears his eyes and balls switched places,
leaving him eyes as balls and balls as eyes.
I wonder what Susie made of that.
The hand-made visions bent in reverse
from what they sculpted.
They sculpted, they didn't write;
he made that clear.
Seeing so many things at once,
he often closed all his eyes but two:
though held in dark, hairy flesh,
they could never look away
from the spectral energies of sex.
His fingers braced the pen hard,
burning fabrics with everyday solutions
to mold his generative visions.
Changed colors under the eyelids,
flashing wildly through temporal truths.
Between his thighs, he blindly patterned
a second-sight; through which,
in my current, precarious infringement,
I can only carry you so far.
Poets aren't made as they used to be.
There is nothing clever in the annals
of madness and unadorned magic;
and though writers today can write,
they rarely can sculpt concrete imagination
from this block of dead realities.
Clever as they are—
with their pristine intelligence.
Though I can see what Susie saw;
this I know from what she has drawn
on the last page of my book.
She did become the infamous "Miss Auspicious":
the eccentric ophthalmology student
whose body was never found.
But whose eyes were the first
new color discovered in an unspeakably long time.
like the-bit-too-neatly sewn eyes of a gorgon,
from an otherwise decently illustrated book.
I bought it for five bucks at the newly opened
Green Book Shop out on West Main.
The men that sold it to me,
with their computers,
couldn't tell me when it was written
or who it's by.
There are eyes in the book,
though they don't look back at me
like some pre-mad philosopher's abysmal monsters,
or a no less slanted devil's book of law.
A child could have drawn these eyes,
and practically a child has
drawn something worth
as much as any barcode edition tome.
Crayon marks tell me
this book is someone else's, it belongs to Susie Robinson,
or did, when she was apparently no more than
six or seven years old.
Not very old since it's a book with a barcode;
but there's something ancient in the drawings,
despite the copies and the paper in the printing.
The writing is a slow burn,
it grows on you like a drug or dream purchased potion
in those things I thought only I wrote in the burned down
library of my brain.
It's a physical writing that comes through
the glossy paper; an old
witchscratch handwritten book of shadows.
It drops into and cracks your stomach,
sending corrupted mind blood back to your head.
It starts with how one day
the wrinkled skin at the joints of the fingers
came unsealed, and eyes opened.
Soon this was the only way to see,
since it appears his eyes and balls switched places,
leaving him eyes as balls and balls as eyes.
I wonder what Susie made of that.
The hand-made visions bent in reverse
from what they sculpted.
They sculpted, they didn't write;
he made that clear.
Seeing so many things at once,
he often closed all his eyes but two:
though held in dark, hairy flesh,
they could never look away
from the spectral energies of sex.
His fingers braced the pen hard,
burning fabrics with everyday solutions
to mold his generative visions.
Changed colors under the eyelids,
flashing wildly through temporal truths.
Between his thighs, he blindly patterned
a second-sight; through which,
in my current, precarious infringement,
I can only carry you so far.
Poets aren't made as they used to be.
There is nothing clever in the annals
of madness and unadorned magic;
and though writers today can write,
they rarely can sculpt concrete imagination
from this block of dead realities.
Clever as they are—
with their pristine intelligence.
Though I can see what Susie saw;
this I know from what she has drawn
on the last page of my book.
She did become the infamous "Miss Auspicious":
the eccentric ophthalmology student
whose body was never found.
But whose eyes were the first
new color discovered in an unspeakably long time.
