Hi Everyone,
I wrote the first 3 of these sonnets while having a prolonged panic attack in a coffee shop as a way to try and calm myself down. They're loosely modeled after Hopkins's Terrible Sonnets. I've also been playing with cut out poetry (I read too much Susan Howe), so a few of these sonnets aren't in the same font as everything else because i had to turn them into pictures to cut them apart. I also fucked up the color on one of them, but it's whatever. Anyway, these deal with religion, suicide, poetry, mental health--you know, all the usual evelynn things.
Oh! also. I played with the sonnet form a ton in this sequence. There are many iambs, but few lines of iambic pentameter, and a lot of the rhyme schemes are mixed and matched from various sonnet types (e.g., petrarchan sestet + shakespearean octave; i think one of them is terza rima; you'll see). Also some don't have a regular rhyme scheme at all, and I just rhymed where it felt right. I spent a long time trying to figure out how to make sonnets more experimental. In all I think I wrote about 70 sonnets, but a lot of them didn't make the final cut, so this series is 25 poems long.
Waking up still alive is the loneliest thing I’ve ever done
Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile
Shakespeare, Love’s Labours Lost
1.
Blanking with a strange intensity:
an etched out lot: a spasm in the brain: a tensing
strand of muscle shoulders sunlight with a roll. I wrench
my shoulders smaller
than they are—condensed like pain to neuron’s light
—the world is an effort larger
than I have: I’m thinning out: I carve myself
myself: I have to slip through my own cracks. My life’s
a monumental quip. Hurry up already, bitch.
The buildings all around are tall
& Atlas died off with his myth.
I wish I had a mental atlas or some gall.
My hands are shaking, mr god
& I have things to do, but all my light is garish, flickered, odd.
2.
Coring out the winter light in tiny hours, we retreat
from callous laters & the plight of circularity
where everything is loops: the loop
of rapture & return: the leary weather eating
the erratum of a day: polarity:
what was, will be: the crude
present unbestowed & blooming makes its lesions
candled bright across the clock: what I want to say is that
I’ve done this thing before: the even
I was told I am is coming off too fast:
to chart the course of clouds across the sky
is just another way of holding what a word
can bless: or what is left, or right, or lie:
to make the larger small is comforting: if we incur—
3.
Here, in eye’s mind, light-like, I find god in skyhalls
not at all—tried it summer winter spring flung fall—
comfort’s somewhere, elsewhere—here
mind wanders, mixes, swirls out
of bounds & binds itself in thornwire,
barbed choir: singing spitlike, braincrag’d: Adam’s
apple is the ugly apple of the eye: our laughter like a pyre
comes and burns out Eden for an atom
fragment: or for another infinite, a fractal pattern: how to craft
one calm evening—give me over, over tatters:
here’s a brain that’s post-wish, pre-splatter
or was once. I need a place of cover, don’t be daft. Here comes water,
mountain, moonbeam: climes irreparable & fright’ning.
In this light the mirror’s beautiful as fractal patterns after lightning.
4.
Thunderheaded ululations—sinners in the hand of—
of imitative origin: the wail: to learn what’s old I’m opening the ground:
an anchorite of rock: O you are men of casual stone: hell was bolstered off the cuff
this time: we dive right in: the concept of a sin I’ve found
is something I don’t understand—don’t hold your
breath, I’m not about to lay out my new theory of our sins:
I’ve spent my time already prostrate on the floor,
amid the din & batter of a god who hated sex, who placed in separate bins
the separate wrongs I did—a jealousy, a curse, his name
a sin, so odd—who loved to count his precepts line by line.
What I want this time is rest: the freedom to give up
the things I’ve given up. Hell was formed by falling & the impact framed
me like a window: to be seen: not sacred or profane: but what falls in kind
among its kind: unshod in measures, labels, lines, or god: let pass this cup.
5.
How small this suicide seems
tonight: where every window is dread:
& harbored & knotted grows every thread.
The city asks me for my dreams.
I have taken the pills to put me
to sleep, but cannot sleep. In the morning
I will awaken tired, sick as lead
but able to think for a day.
Think of the snow, please,
of the winter, forming
& the light through the window easing
that forgetting is a type of decay.
Lord turn a clean eye toward morning.
Let us beak these bands asunder: opus dei.
6.
Closet, mirror, scrapeboard, we come close & closed.
Chase & chastise: Charon’s chump. Charred matchstick
of a head, this one. Burn on / burn out.
Burn in / burn off & turn: just to flicker
requires small explosions. Tones
of black & grey gone long in new blank mirrors.
What we see outside can’t show us
the strange tiers of the interior.
We need microscopes to see what will
be seen inside the mind—but seeing that
will never show us what we want to see:
how to winter over this uncradled darkled thrill.
The candlewicks inside go tit for tat.
For now, the strikes are lucky: one, two, three. There’s that.
7.
When times that come of calm are here—rejoice
in quiet & do work. The closecurved space, the bouldered mind
is clear. Come on! Let’s go! The work we have
to do is ready to be done. Put on your poise:
a brilliant image of the sun at work in shine.
A mirror showing us what’s really there: the glass:
the light inverted in the eye & picked up by
the brain. Each piece does its small part in time.
In time—the nonplace place we always are—
our time is running out, I’m running on,
I’ve always felt that time and I belong
to each other like a pair of mirror’d gloves:
the left—(that’s me)—& right (not mine). My body’s got a steady tick
& time’s slow blood is beating like a person: healthy / sick.
8.
& as the rain that falls on asphalt streets
creates another vision of the random sky
to mirror where they fell with where they fall, in each
a combination of the wind, the water, gravity & high
flung low, so does the static pattern make
a double chaos mirror’d: sky & ground.
It’s like the rain strikes twice, like things that ache
to see the world new just see it upside down.
I have been long at trying so to make the random / order
dialectic something that I understand
—that word “dialectic” presses something hoarded
to the surface: something that I can
build high toward my own unfettered theory of the mind
(& that’s a lie: the word slips off: & so I make my end in kind).
9.
I lived beside a moon of love the time I lived
in pattern with the stars. The soft night light was blue
and white, until the orange shiv’d
in us that prison of the streetlamp. I accrued
myself in time. All things in time (in time we’ll know
if this is true) became a phrase I rued
more than the coming day (they come & go
in time, as well) which meant responsibilities
I could not plan—a walk: a carnival: a meal in the sun: a show
of sudden force. It’s time again:
I’m looking for the moon of love.
I want the quiet that the sky is shirking with agility.
The calendar does startling things above.
The moon has been pushed out. Here’s radiation’s interstellar shove.
10.
Ferocious, melted, faltered echo, this:
atomic something humming like a possibility, its distance
as we walk along & feel the air half crisp
half redolent refraction of ourselves without an instance
worth of hallelujah spared to drink. Right now, I’m all elation and/or else conflation
numbers / knowledge / feeling / whattish / gambol / love
I waffle all along wharf of what, without insurance or instantiation.
In poetry, they told me, we should look for types of mirrors of ourselves: the dove,
the water, tablets, pills & liquor—
well whatever, it’s just one archetype we tell of misery,
another still of a happiness found quicker
than the myth that nothing’s flimsy, nothing melts.
To echo all calamity in stone & paper, ink & dross—so what?
We’re close and closing in to find the thing we loudly want to belt.
11.
Impunity & mud: inception: loose leaf: mind like fitted glove.
We sweat clear burgundy & simple claims. We feel
what we feel, nothing more.
This tiny lie achieves a vaulted status in our lore.
We feel more than we can comprehend,
we sort & cable, sift & mimic, wish
that we could know to know, portend.
With open throat we breathe astride a growing itch.
I mind, you mind. She/he/it minds (s/h/it). Mind minds mind.
It’s repetition makes a thing familiar
lets it conform, absolves us of our hasty, aging grammar.
Too much repetition makes us strange and leaves the rind
beside itself. The pulpy shell of sense. What was was, or is is shelved.
Behind my back, I juggle oranges: three, or six, or twelve.
12.
Boxed up like a rind of sense. Then open
as the wing in flight. The thing’s ground down & opened off.
What I mean to say is I miss thinking like the kind of chalk
we use to draw white trees. This new god’s blue & off the cuff.
He seems like groping for a brick inside the sun.
His angels all repeat themselves three times. Their words hallucinate,
degenerate from spiders / ciders / criers like a summer blight.
In error once I made a hall of heaven from a little stone
& in a smaller crack found there the devil—stopped to ask him where
I’d gone. He said: look out kid you
won’t like it—you’re at home.
So home’s alright, I guess. The world’s awful bright in hell.
The devil paves my roads with poppies, angled flowers, bits of mess,
then steps inside my tiny house & starts—“well, well.”
13.
Insolent hellscape: mind like fitted glove: again
in this inverted old rotation of spacetime: I tell
myself this is a glove that fits: in 10
I’ll be back to myself this time, impelled
like so toward the better warden’s skeleton: the wake
is starting over soon: put on
your best dress & the mask to hide: the ache
of that old imposition: sleep: the dawn:
it’s all undone: this is: that was: particulars
picked out in lime light: this & that: the mind like cordless kite:
“this is”: “that was”: the phrases perpendicular
like space & time: to travel on through one requires dilation: you can see
the world from this height: it’s over there: it’s looking gaunt:
it’s looking like whatever I don’t want.
14.
Clear & simple: so: the feeling that we’re always starting out
we’re getting nowhere by this vicus: after all
the prophets warned us, fearful of the clocks & maps of doubt
that we began to fashion after us: & lo: appalled
a sigh they took for evidence of holiness & gall: became
protracted in a dialect of stone to an avoidant god: what is
the human use of human beings (hell if I know): & they sought to tame
the rise of getting nowhere: for we’ve gotten where we are & this
is where we need to be—still looking up: the last vault
left to vaunt us: no / or / yes: elastic answers in the hand
of a commodious god: I’m looking up: the sky’s unwalled:
this morning you’ll receive the news: the prophets have been canned
I’m charting out a course to crack the creel where we’re caught:
the map’s unreal: but at least we’re at the dock.
15.
poem for the voice in my head
Psychosis: frantic: chaos & contusion: the frenetic texture
of a random noise still ringing cognate shadow dispensations: fast
as sound—is that the radio, or god, or pigeons at the window—I’m outside myself: a fixture
that repeats repeats: I can’t sleep: we have to check the face: the hands miscast:
light on / light off: retry: the oven & the door are shaking:
all you see are selves in the periphery: the pattern on the floor is playing
theater on the wall: it’s melting so pull off the paper:
wrench the blue part white: I NEED MORE LIGHT!: until your mouth is coming out:
you’re bleeding: all those teeth inside one head: this
is another god’s adventure: tear the body: drill the skull: so many mouths: the world’s a gout:
I’m lining up the things from mine to his:
it’s dark & nothing now is new or safer—
I’m looking for a smaller space so I can’t sneak
up on myself like this. I’m getting better, so to speak.
16.
There on the body’s shore: the mind: elliptical:
each changing place with that which goes before:
I understand recursion in the company of sound & more
than that I have the feeling that I’m not quite cyclical—
I’m seasonal, perhaps: but that seems old, epiphanal
as hell: that’s not what I’m about: my lore
is the lore of confusion: how it all wore
onward in a winter cloud: I have not mislaid the image of the icicle
that forms inside the gorge’s throat: its smooth surface
framed by frozen aggregate: it hangs within: I have been driven
to abstraction from my concept of the ampersand that curves,
as I do, back upon itself: almost infinity: I’m looking for the skeleton
key to the river: I’m sailing on a history of colder rain:
we live in almost sequent toil, & we walk the brain.
17.
Drunken eschatology: a lucid spatter: onward: gutter: rye:
who spilled ellipses all across my cloudy hand?
this symmetry’s rotational, at best: the street’s an axis wobbled: & I’m shy:
too shy to tell you, if I could: how all the crammed
up vertebrae of god are coming loose
his whole eternal spine is threading out the space
of space: so long he has to measure it in time: not ruthlessness:
the measure of our former god: his face
we could not see & could not try to be around:
I’m coming round this time: we’ve all been had:
& you are looking godlike in that robe:
I’m sick: I’m god: I’m talking to the ground
& things are emptying like mad:
god’s rolling dice again: it’s whiskey on the frontal lobe.
19.
The eye is hardly deep: a centimeter, maybe two: I haven’t
measured yet: just give me time: I keep a close watch
on the time: we’re locked in here, against the day: an agent
writing out an endless preface to imaginary works: a Rorschach
test for time: or those that find themselves in time, replacing
dialogic truths with mumbo jumbo—I know, I know: we’ll botch
it all together, stitch & thread: a bit of wire: simple tape:
it’s anything at all to keep the eye from closing out the light:
is there no place for me to go: no mumbling: no little chase
that I can make: do with me what you want: the egg white
of my eye is yours: I’d offer you a better prize: a real show:
I’d harness lightning: jargon from the bitter tree: a bit of fire: height:
but all of that I’d rather keep away: I roll a set of bones
to watch them stop: the words are clear: come on, let’s go.
21.
Pallid headlight on the road: in the newsflash of the mind
what’s bright is bright because it asks
a question answered: where’d you go: the dime
rolls toward its center: nighttide rasps
the sun away: the headlight on the road
is whiter than the evening sun: is whiter
than the gasps he makes: we sift out loop from monad,
node: the shifting center of the eye enlarges, fire
falls luxurious to ground from sky: vice
versa for the soul they told me: all that glittering
instrument arose in contemplation: stalagmites
form more quickly: the infinity of you is broke: the fidgeting
of absence: headlight on a road of ash:
you found out heaven in a roadway gash: but why—
22.
I tried to strike a chord, indelible in my own way
but struck a match that wouldn’t light.
I died for light, for music in my way. I tried to fight, to only pray
or wipe my thoughts onto a stringless kite
for something other than the flow of ohms
that powers this. I never knew who I was meant to spite
but something told me that I had to build a dome
of red-black marble where I’d hold my sheepish thoughts
& so I set to mining, quarries, queries, looking for the image of a home
in colors where I’d feel at home. My peace is bought
at a cheap price today. Call off the lights, the boxing match.
They’ve offered us a deal: only all we’ve got.
I’ve got a box of eggs & a ticket to scratch.
My life is trying to accord. I’m waiting for my plan to hatch.
23.
& so I come to climb the cage: the ribs upward the spine
as off the shoulder water rolls its moving place:
to shower feels like being born: it has the tine
of something that I don’t remember, or a grace
I had but want to go back to: my weakened bones
form up a faulty ladder to my head
where things that falter come to rest & telephone
the god who makes the rain instead
of me—he has a broader shoulder, thicker legs
and raises some great branch of hickory toward
the sky & tells of rain to come to this dry land & pegs
begin to form a ladder like the lord’s,
inside the fractured, arid sky to lead us to a taller rain:
his voice resounds: he puts the thinner clouds to shame.
24.
It runs & deep it does: deep does it:—what is it with these its
they’re coming out like summer swarms of spiders, tiny: nested
in the corners of the wall: enough to look like dirt or bits
of mold still growing: eradication: what volcanic force is resting
it in it: the referent recluse: aflame: aglow (it glows, like this, you see, like so:) high strung:
who unbottons the shirtsleeves of the volcano undoes
the beautiful symmetry of the mountain: hungered
after like language after emotion—after what was
the time to say after—once I wove the braid of my sleep faster
yellow afterimages of eyelids close to what I saw
the first moments after dark emerge as bright & vast
expanses: overhead the night begins revision of its playground law:
the floor is lava: & the moon is peacing us to bits:
I’m gathering them up: it’s raw: you’re it.
.
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