B.K. Shapere

9 poems

Benjamin Shapere is writing here, now there. His new book Perfume Anthrax (Progress Print) is coming this year.

All along I rode.a

At the next greek calends
When all the world will be content
And you will be your own
Heir. I mean this unironically
You will be your own air. John
Said you have to hear the air
As if every one of them were
Your vibrations cold train. A
Young mask does not care to
Do chores I easily perceive
How much. I chair it anyhow
Weathering it out under an
Umbral umbrella it is neither
Shabby nor hot wheat comes
Here like cabbies where you
Are. I don’t miss the city where
Being is fundament, is agricultural
I think we are turnips, and as
I’ve gotten grayer my eyebrows
Smile nonsense as you once
As we once spoke on holidays
The correction is absence
Is a peasant’s leave of stay
Sliding out suddenly from
The compound gentry.

Nuclear potash as veteran benefit...

nuclear potash as veteran benefit
in volume finding deep magnates
this is weeping reduction as trace
no longer the liver is noon now
this ostensively rect spits bones
copious wave water re-gills
spiral terminologies of geocholeras
worms become fish as they snuggle
in to umbral alexandria angles meet
me at the next exit this is not an
entrance to mealiness this is rubric
to lunar plexus a sybil shipwright in
sun substitution it grazes me often
how the light is so razor charlie

In a Motel

If they could chart up all the sex we had on a big graph,
If you could just walk around, here and not laugh
If you could emanate a blue light, a blue light not squeamishly pixelated
the technical project would be technically completed,
and we ourselves suddenly
would blast off
for vacation in Manila.

Spell semiotic

I wanted to

I wanted to erm

Lol so awkward to say it

Even the lols were

Even they were gallop polls

Vaulted holes? Surrendered koan

I mean coal surrendered born I

Meant burned I said that again the

King

Fishing the forest copulating as they

Say under the moon and out of

Fear we had the sudden remembrance

Of the printed grotto its images of

Jove, and his multiplicity, always positive

Lies. To the philologists I send

Lies. I come to my senses

Or was that a true proposition,

The explanation of nest never interesting.

Geriatric Mississippi Cruise

The most silent of all lamps

This long passage through song a short cut

I blare my horn twenty time so all the dogs get shorn once

This is a geese festival for twenty HAM radio-hours the load is good it is cerebral

xenotherapy

can you ejaculate an imagining immediately as if that had no concern for me here?
burn up to the tune of the nine therapies for strangers
Yo tambien había hablado mucho
Perhaps no sabe donde está la niñita
via earphones veritably distance airplaces
the rapport between one and another translucent mirrors
Suddenly being watched in the information surplus party
ignorance being distributed in three distinct piles
the first the horse or the vacuum of phases
then reminiscences of court
fifth count of the candle’s inconstant cauldron
finally skip only in zip-ties
until antlers grow tarnlike into the thinking
alleyway of a peace-jacket
so resolve the pointillism under your eyelids into sundered weaving tutorials
tarry where money is attended: non-offending baseball games
wherein he wept ambiently
holding nothing’s hand, it wasn’t easy to navigate yandex to call in the damn ecce homo
I had no idea you ran an online mobile
I simply had to empty my empire
I hardly stepped aside to disguise my orphans
where is the war mainly?
there shuttlecocks under oceans of new turnstiles watch
for just the right moment throwing jade knucklebones
my fleet watches the right stereo die and smile
I can teach you no more young proteus
so sorry I gave you that entelechy
so here are the wires, understand you can’t now go finally
without soldering.

Yes that was the

yes that was the first film
mystic river balcony bar
with that olive tapenade
that could make you go
musical
universal aristocracy of everyone involved
here here
let’s get some applause for these criminals condemned to taxes
and what else
never mind a phrase
i learned of an onion
man in inland croatia
has just come to me
spoken into a church wall
where the Id slops.

Brittle

The philological spasm was on my lips O.D. Brodie
I tried to time the prophecy but there were augers there
Were more, there were much more northern than pirates, viking horse-
Heads and drunk for 3 days in thousands of designations
Of insight. Of course you were there and around there
Always I saw your swim-tights compound trill. Neither
Bound and both gosh: neither bound and both got
Feeler-down I couldn’t. Gosh fuck I couldn’t life you
Down so suddenly and keep going northerly.

Lecture

There seemed to be three options.
The first, contraction, in which the system would, before or after or at the same time as it deadlined or almost deadlined or began to deadline, balloon in on itself, like a deflated football, slough off its skin or its mass in real time in a way that would have been incredible or either really sad or really incredibly sad to see, and sink into its deadlock, its bare bones pulsating with the marrow-heart which had always been held too close or too much at a distance for any respectable kenning or reportable presentation or at the least, at the very least scientific measurement: and perhaps something then, at last, would begin to speak.

The second was expansion, in a proliferation of itself the system would pass over the obstacles, merely empirical at the end of the day, and become more than we ever imagined. Within this option lay a two-fold danger: that it would accelerate beyond comprehension, and become a sort of trinitarian mystery without even the schema, triadic or otherwise, which we have always applied or been able to even the greatest enormities. This was not necessarily a bad thing, as long as the system kept its peace. What would an expansive peace look like? An endless rocketing in every direction? Of fire but the heart of silence in it? But what if the heart was too silent? What if this heat bred a work so cold that the system would dilate in fever, we ourselves sucked into the vacuum cleaner? At any rate, expansion seemed good, seemed the upward path even if in reality it was omnidirectional, or of infinite scope, perhaps it would give us, dialectically, an inner eye on what the first would reveal only apocalyptically: what if we could represent the heart indirectly, as though through laser-proof sunglasses, and toast our marshmallowing champaign glasses or Marlboros, as in a circle without a center whose circumference was everywhere, and all laugh heartily?

There seemed to be a third: rectified equilibrium. This would be a kind of Confucian stabilization of the nodes, a revoking of both the instabilities necessary for setting off contraction and continuing the growth of the upward path or reddening spiralisation of the connective-disconnective edges. This would curve both the downward and the upward spirals into the figure of an open sphere, or circle, cooling the babbling magma or ossified chaosmos that is speculated by the first and second options to be at the heart of it all, respectively, and walking the middle road of peace respectably, like the Anglican church, we would stroll or bathe between two extremes which both in their execution posed potentially final solutions of barbarism or annihilation or even barbaric annihilation. Could we scan the surfaces of the system, then, in a detached topology provided we had a fireproof method for reciprocal and friendly (I mean distant and sea-like) observation: the rectification of heart-names? Would we then write a final haiku always or something? It’s hard to imagine it without relaxing a bit, like the idea of going to a sauna. At any rate, these are the three, or were they really, appearing on the screen just now, and we wanted to know, like kids at a candy store, if you pardon it all, couldn’t  we have all three and in that case who’s papa?