Poem’s Poem of Love

Not saying the word reliably, historically
like weather or the knots
in thinking around
emotional language, tangled
in this bright mid-day moment (of reading)
and the medium
and a pronoun . . .

And “you” is never easy—
a striated sign of things
to come and counter
to the sense of sentence, its ease
and assurance—so the word
“with” becomes still uneasier and
I walk into the sunlit room,
poem in hand, a proximity,
molecular and climatic,
twined and tugging tight
half listening to the news
of storms forming
over the warming oceans . . .

A deligitimized ground, standing
there, as if through a semblance
of scientific instrumentation, who
is who’s target is the question and
the water line wavers in the
refracted calculations--you look up your altitude
in an archaic book of symbols,
you look up and tell me we need
to flee . . .

Love is resistant to anti-
biotics, bodies react to themselves
and become something else; later
we hear 21st century love retreated from the coasts,
subsided in the mountains, subsisted
on salmon and berries . . .

We read “red” in the remaining
records, and “faith”—but these
codes fail, these letters fall still, cars by the side
of the highway house
sparrows and squirrels,
a reorganized polis . . .

And I’d like to think
of us, by the side of the derelict
highway, bereft and happy,
a fistful of yarrow and a wooden cup of tea
but the future tense may
not be, love’s love sprung
from the old language, from
the subject’s regime . . .

The half-theory of poetry, by Ken Belford

Poets are natural resources.
Poetry is the ultimate reality.
When there are no new poems, nothing is happening.
There is a cause for every word, and every word has an effect.
Poems only come from previous poems.
The supply of poems depends on the price of ink.
The demand for poems is carbon based
and depends on the amount of pages a publisher is willing to pay for.
This is called the demand for poetry.
Resources are wasted when poems are forcibly fixed to universities.
Sometimes there are shortages, sometimes there are surpluses,
and sometimes people pay too much for a book of poems.
All poets pay rent to their publishers
and the main cause of cost differentials is locational.
A poem in the pocket is better than one in the future.
Money cannot create poetry.
Poetry that is present is an indictor of national wealth.
Poetry that is still unwritten comes with high interest.
Each poet is a self-owner.
No poet is superior.
Whomever harms a poet is evil.
Free trade of poetry is the key to social peace.

Poem’s Dwelling

"The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell."
--Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought

where and where a conjunction
occurs, Poem’s home is
in a thrumming arc of self
effacement and unraveling
scene traced back to the eye

a point, a punct of filiation;
knowing in time spent not
knowledge but a strange sense
of self-friction, thigh on thigh or
night’s finger on ethics; it seems

a rhythmic disassociation, Poem’s
body out-doing itself in a physics
of resingularization; he props
himself on the precipice of
an eyelid, shifting, sees static

walls lined with tricky
contradictions: unrecorded music,
overdo lessons, scientific discoveries;
Poem’s place curls in his belly,
a pang of loss, and unfurls

Poem the Spiritual

Poem trips over the word
that isn’t there. The stumble
puts food on the table, accrues
interest. Praise is bestowed
for not looking back, closer,
and Poem soon forgets
to watch where he is
going.

Back in the day, it wasn’t
even a question; the speeches
moved Poem’s parents (now
disavowed, but still recorded
in the court registry) like
the weather or comedy. The gut
they called it—Poem was
using his gut. The food was
from a long
way away.

The first ulcer came. Poem
misheard it as “Ulster” from the history
books colliding and the old country’s
ferocious hunger
became his own.

The second ulcer wasn’t one but was
related. It hung on Poem’s
free-wheeling pace and gradually
slowed his progress. The visual
icon held his gaze on his death-
bed, smoldered over his shoulder, held
his attention rapt, clasped it when he should have
been busy watching
his footing.