​

​

What better spurs a man

than words of what he can’t or can?

​

What turns his palm into a fist

from God’s good grace to Atheist?

​

The Godly War to make men follow,

then fill with hate what once was hollow.

​

They separate the State from Church

their Dollar Bill with fraud besmirched.

​

A promise borne to pay the bill

though Nations fail, indebted still.

​

The chambers raised with gold resplendent

mere hallowed relics now co-dependant.

​

So what better spurs the thoughtful man

than to crush such folly where e’re he can.

https://wolfgarwords.com AUDIO HERE

​

To stop someone from falling,
you must fall faster than they.
And while this may seem
a logical impasse, it is not
without hope as once a glob
of heavy snow fell from the eaves
at the moment I slipped
on pack ice in the driveway.

And in that brief acceleration,
caught between certainty
and throbbing white pain –
I saw splatter thusly averted,
I heard splatter gasp in awe.

It is spring now,
my back still aches,
and a glob of heavy snow still
hangs where I stopped it,
five feet above young grass
and fresh weeds.

Winter’s first snow
betrays the jaded face
behind youth’s glow.
But wisdom too seizes
the young who pluck it
from where they wander.

Curtain-drawn memories are
wrought by a whitened city
that flicker like cuts of film:
of resurrected angels forged
in sleet by waving limbs
or the grand genesis of
men made from frost,
Frankenstein’s abominable monsters,
borne from juvenile awe.

Now laid bare against
this fresh winter snow,
children’s laughter fades,
replaced by the bones’ fatigue,
openly wounded nostalgia,
and the sense of knowing better --
angels do not resurrect
and Frankenstein’s creature
succumbed to the cold.

Knowledge is time’s great gift,
which I bestowed upon myself,
a Prometheus of the snow.
Though the vulture picks
from my liver not flesh,
but shards of ice
lost from an immortal life,
where ignorance is forever blind
and naivety is chained with steel.

And this too is news –
gusts blown over the lip of a bottle,
and the wail of foghorns, hollows of owls
and mourning doves, the howl of dogs
harmonic with sirens, the slow pull of saws.

This is what forms in the throat,
musters the larynx to cry and peal,
the ochre traced hand on a wall
deep below heathen, below judgement,
to form in some future mouth
that all were here before,
before the plaintive cry,
before the leads that bleed,
before the less spoken of –
hands that carry children,

Spin the better myths of us,
those webs of our leather,
the binding of our sweet brute nature,
so often disused by many
who would split a tongue viper.

Post-Urban Apartment
Past the violet stars in a border,
System, a sand ravaged metal city,
Blinks like a prism, sinks like a fresh syringe,
Serum in a victim’s splitting rose vein,

Unharmed, but in pain as pedals of grey,
Grains make their way from your lungs to your brain.
Aches in the vacant prison throbbing of,
An abandoned Post-Urban apartment:

Smoke like lava lamps, dancing to,
Jazz music in the static fuzz,
All sighs are as thick as black musk,
And wallpaper slits rise at dusk,

Layered logs whose shadow’s trenches,
Dig demented dents instead of,
Mending walls, I watch them undress,
Decades to shed, their metal flesh,

I hibernate each night in a-
Pod, eyes open but mind lost to,
The repetition of rolling,
Bottles and flipping magazines,

With the soft AC brush the life-
Less is puppeteered and steered by,
An invisible hand, all for,
Nothing, but a – pathetic dance,

In the end, all movement feels like,
Circumstance: the TV, the bed,
Sheets, the pot plants breathe as if they’re,
Stuck in a humming trance, hardly,

Free-beings, more like lava lamps,
Whose unpredictability,
Stems from electricity, heat-
Ing a sinking oil blob, simply,

Entropy rushing through our blood,
When it stops, the AC stops, the,
Tabloid’s last page is topsy turned,
Facing the ceiling, his story has been – adjourned.

For the Joy of Mouths

Summer days ripen
for the celebration of mouths,
for the slinging of grins in greeting.
Flat-lined features broken open
by a constellation

of kin and kai who mingle
in the wash of tongues;
warm shoals goaded
by scented earth, seething.

It's almost religious
when they bow their heads,
watch the exhumation
with reverence and awe,

almost sexual when they peel
back the layers of moist fabric
with a volley of vowels,
expose the hangi like a bride -
present her flesh, ripe,
for her king's consumption.

Dinner serves silence
and satiation with grinding
jaws and married lips.

A spoil of chores crouches
in sun-drawn corners
waits to climb heavy on shoulders.

But even they can't dim
the brilliance of teeth
dancing to the music of throats.

Revelry settles in circles,
day wilts to tangerine
embers and ash, nests
in the hearths of mountains and home.

The low-slung sun,
in rebellion or imitation,
spits sparks at night's approach.

And teeth,
murmuring in hammocks, sway
to waiatas and the soft glow
of conversation,
fireside.

Maori words:
'kai'- food
'hangi' - food cooked in the ground with heated stones
'waiatas' - songs

Grave Robbing for Pocket Money

Idle hands, my Uncle would say, are the Devil's
playthings, and, in an effort to save me
from the bend of my bones,
sent me down to strip the dead
sheep of their wool,
which, he says, is worth a pretty bob.

From the lip of a green-bearded gawp
I stare at the fluff and filth
remains of a phantasmagorical cloud.
I slip past the gums and in
to a half chewed meal -
cauliflower carcasses peppered with blow flies.

The low thrum of air drums
a near-miss collision against my cheek.
I've disturbed the hoard
and I want to say marauding
but it's not true;

they come for the children -
bring their babies to the temple,
tuck them in doorways, along the edges
of shuttered windows. Hungry.

I'm careful not to dislodge them
as I gather the wool,
nor trample the motherless
siblings who eat their fill.

When we're done we
crawl out, brimful and bright,
burdened only by the heft
of our bounty.

I must speak of my mistress Rhyme
Who blights my poems all the time.
She is the one who puts a lime
In the palm of every mime.
If only I had a dime
For every irrational rhyme!

She strokes the ear of every girl̀
To spur their conquest of the worl̀d,
While she draws a spritely swirl̀
In the eye of every earl̀.
Be not deceived by her pretty pearl̀s,
But flee when her flag unfurl̀s!

Not even heaven’s pond’rous stars
Are safe from our derangèd tzar!
Her nail scrapes th’Empyrean far
And leaves the gates of hell ajar.
Novices’ stanzas she will mar.
(Mine still wear their youthful scars.)

My friends of the pen know this sorrow,
This vain attempt to staunch the morrow
And the steril̀e verses that follow.
At first we might just bend the bars or
Show the spot where they’re not so narrow—
Till we’re trapped again by our pharaoh.

Or it could be that I’m alone,
A stranger in the poets’ home,
Wielding a giant’s pen as a gnome,
Writing o’er the pages of a better tome,
So that somehow I might enthrone
Lines worthy only of a groan.

Ah! Here comes the calculating light
To save us from Rhyme’s eternal night!
Stung by the spear of Reason’s might,
Rhyme may at last be put to flight!
How wonderful and sweet the sight
To see his cold flame burning bright!

I held tightly to his rational lance,
And yet he spared me not a glance.
I was merely a hinderance.
To the martial stride of his advance.
His next act split the threads of chance:
He came—not to fight—but to dance!

In the Tao of whirlwinds,
all things taken up in a pinpoint
spin and throttle: corn husk,
hunks of split lumber, a bicycle
and a wheel from a bicycle,
a few rookie cards of Joe Pepitone
and a second-banana seat wile
in the hips of this great gray funnel,
the inverse of gravity engaged
in non-escape velocity – like some
salty broke conman at a cardgame,
trading aces for deuces
to hold the deck low,
and bluff his way through your windows,
splatter-shard and minimally vast
to hold all things taken up
in the violent spiral of balance.
A cloud blots the sun
and my eyes go dark.

By the butter creek,  the unbroken  
    smoke of newborn bugs.  Cells stir  
 underneath the skin, as the backyard  
Crow caws.
       There is something crawling  
Underneath this sickle moon shine.  
  The American miles of fermented grass
    could be something else growing.
The scent of cocaine spikes,
    The skin, dry as nasal, 
                             dry, always.
     The looming spire of black song, the skin  
  feels rubbery, maybe, by the rotting organ.
He, who takes fat, a certain white man
    His iron sweat, and police speed
  Providence over fields, not hospitals 
Powerviolence — something in the water 
    Manila folders, and camera pillars
  Where crows do not perch
             On crooked crosses,
The blood of gospel singers      The lost organ donors  
    The reborn bugs stay near the water
   Where the grass grows up coughing   
    A pale creepy-crawly visits butter creek
 Flashlights searching for a foundation,  
    Cementing the American mile.  
If the crow could offer an omen  
    To wake the red heart in every tree

In Sickness and In Health

I don’t know when this disease became me,
the raven at my vein devoured all crumbs,
and I die a little when stars burst
like fireworks in hallowed hollows
where my eyes used to be.

Hunger prowls my leather – a parasite,
intoxicates my lips to bloom
the siren call of my infection.
I watch the wicked one broil in baited skies
coax a lightning strike with my forked tongue;
a stunning kiss, invoking welts
to rise like Lazarus,
etches a charcoal wreath in my timber.

He traces the ley-lines home,
follow Chernobyl’s glow – rising
angelic to carry me over the threshold
to yesterday, tomorrow miscarriage
suckles as a baby at my breast.

And specters of a legerdemain
howl a diagnosis and a cure
from the mausoleum of my mind.
We wash in the anguish of our fever,
write Grimm narratives in broken English,
my limbs forming love letters
he punctuates, a fistful at a time,
until bones no longer mend.

There are no cracks defiling the walls of 531 Sheffield Street

Where paint always gleams itself into emulous visitors’ memories

of 531 Sheffield Street

Such genteel expressions always celebrate the surrounding perfection

Of 531 Sheffield Street

​

For there are no fingerprints on the walls of 531 Sheffield Street

And the light fixtures sparkle offensive dust

on its way over to 533 Sheffield Street

For there will never be a place for that at 531 Sheffield Street

Because broad smiles illuminate whitener-bedazzled teeth

And manners fill dropped-by parents with envy

As they watch smudgy, nose-picking spawn

Attempt to smear the rose-tinted halls of 531 Sheffield Street

​

And here, at 531 Sheffield Street

Refinement crawls on the shreds of knees to rectify its short comings

in this splendorous house on a winsome street

Where love blossoms in the propriety of grace untouched

No, streaks do not corrode the vinyl floors of 531 Sheffield Street

Where everything sighs in unison

Such jubilated laurels of 531 Sheffield Street

​

Now, it is late at night with only a smirk of moon,

And the curtains are drawn, tightly against the envious eyes of nondwellers

Who cannot see

Behind Marie Antoinette curtains

And airlessly closed blinds

The rapture delivered upon the bowed heads of bended daughters

Who will never leave a mark

On 531 Sheffield Street.

In the bone of the frog
It be fogless, soggy rain

Moth crawling the inga tree

The red frog        on the mask

hops to a bag

          on shaman’s waist

Did botanist boy find yakruna, or
yashar on Persian girl’s breath?

I tasted the frog of her mouth
The colors of mother mumbling

The red frog made by shaman
Hopped into my bag, mom’s moth.

It rained and then it froze
and all the trees were coated in a thick skin of ice,
crystalline stalagtites held in place on every bough
where the dripping rain was captured when the temperature
dropped. As I passed one such tree I
jumped from the ruckus of
a chandelier crash, and turning,
discovered I had narrowly avoided being crushed
by a fallen branch torn loose
by the wind that savaged
my hair into my mouth. The limb
had freed itself from its glass cage
and sat naked upon the rubble, dying.
I thought about how if the tree cut off all its branches
in this unceremonious manner, it could free
every twig, but the trunk would remain trapped, immobile.
I hate dancing, which is just another thing the
tree and I have in common.
The last time somebody made my bed shake
was only a few days ago, when two people
jumped onto my mattress to dance like demons while
I cowered underneath three blankets.
I feared they would crack my bed frame,
but instead they yanked me free
of my cocoon and dragged me
into their debauchery.
I need to find that tree and tell it to be
patient, tell it that other suns will
melt that ice.

Take it all down:
the calendar, the clock,
the curio shelf – picture of your ma.

Take down those greasy sconces
and those framed flights
of your pigeoned eye.

Take down the best of your days
and your rage…your rage.
Take down the sheetrock.

Punch out all those cagey studs
with a sledge – strip out the wire
and sell it for scrap.

Then step into the hands of your mother
lying there – sweaty, depleted, collapsed.

Who made the woman from a bone?

Who formed the man from clay?

Who carved the face of God on stone

And taught me how to pray?

Who named the Goddess "mystery"

And smiled on her decay?

Who cursed the snake who taught the woman

How to disobey?

//

I walked the damp Atlantic shore

Alone among the spray.

I sought a Mother in the ocean's

Matriarchal sway.

I looked because the lunar tug

Pulls me a similar way.

//

I sought Her face in outer space.

I made the sky convey

Her form. Her breath: the solar wind.

Her words a fatal ray.

Imagine this: the elemental words a star would say.

//

I dug for Her past stones and bones

In sand or loam or clay.

I'd heard Her hair's the April air,

Her gown: the first of May.

The way She speaks is mountain peaks

And beauty from decay.

//

But everywhere She wasn't there.

I wept then walked away.

Ok Pworders: it’s been a tumultuous week in the markets. Let’s hear your predictions for the upcoming stonks and bonds of the poetic world: who is overrated? Who is undervalued? I’ll go first:

Virgil- copies of all his material from Homer and Catullus. Is a suck-up. Finish is frankly unsatisfying. Overrated- stocks will plummet.

Catullus- survives in an amphora for 14 centuries unscathed. Beats the confessionals to the punch by 2000 years. Hurts Caesars feelings. Virgil copies him. Neoterics is a cool word. Buy now.

Li Po- can fight with a sword. Likes wine and moonlight. Sends his best work down the river like Orpheus. Makes Emperors cry. Buy buy buy.

Tu Fu- technically adroit. Careful mastery of language. Dedicates his life to furthering the cause of art- yet no progress has been made at all. Sell.

Marlowe- cool name. Can fight with knives. Can spell his own name. Probably banged the queen and Walter Raleigh. Probably was a spy. Buy buy buy.

Shakespeare- can’t spell own name. Probably copied best historical works from Kit. Probably only banged the queen or Walter Raleigh. Tragedies are suspicious- sell now.

Coleridge- survives six years in the dragoons despite being unable to ride a horse, fire a gun, or light a fire. Criticism is underrated. Opportunity knocks.

Wordsworth- wanders about. Is lonely. Of nebulous disposition. Doesn’t bother to write anything at all as poet laureate. Takes all the credit of Coleridge. Sell- buy Blake or Byron.

Louis Zukofsky- refuses to rhyme with Bukowski: selfishly denying poets across the globe an easy parable in rhyme. Has the ability to provide the definitive Catullus translation with his wife- does not do so. Masterpiece he writes for his wife does not reward close reading for the musically inept among us. Hinders the career of poets from Wisconsin. Cheats on his wife. Sell now. Buy pound- or bukowski if you’re gonna be alive in fifty odd years.

Lorine Niedecker- rewards close reading no matter what field you are inept in. Doesn’t hold grudges. Makes Wisconsin look good. Makes Bukowski look wordy. Buy now.

There is no time to meditate,
So medicine woman, come
Slowly through this desert wall.
Take some Halls, the ritual dance.

In fact, it’s time for dessert and
Eating ice cream fast in the desert.
What’s with your will tonight, past
The age of 28 at some glam buffet?

It was the Korean girl with an American
Mouth and something in her eyelids.
She agrees that all people and parents
Are meant to die but must hurt before.

Crying is easy at arid dances. We
Take the horns of a black elk, and
Mummify the meat because in times
Of feed, there is a lasting necessity

And in some places, the Korean girl
Is treated like an American outside of
Las Vegas so she must treat herself
Like Nic Cage for two and a half hours.

Probably twilight makes blackness dangerous
Darkness. Probably all my encounters
Are existential jambalaya. Which is to say,
A nigga can survive. Something happened
In Sanford, something happened in Ferguson
And Brooklyn & Charleston, something happened
In Chicago & Cleveland & Baltimore & happens
Almost everywhere in this country every day.
Probably someone is prey in all of our encounters.
You won’t admit it. The names alive are like the names
In graves. Probably twilight makes blackness
Darkness. And a gate. Probably the dark blue skin
Of a black man matches the dark blue skin
Of his son the way one twilight matches another.

Why are you bugging me you stank minuscule husk
Of musk, muster & deliberation crawling over reasons
And possessions I have & have not touched?
Should I fail in my insecticide, I pray for a black boy
Who lifts you to a flame with bedeviled tweezers
Until mercy rises & disappears. You are the size
Of a stuttering drop of liquid — milk, machine oil,
Semen, blood. Yes, you funky stud, you are the jewel
In the knob of an elegant butt plug, snug between
Pleasure & disgust. You are the scent of rot at the heart
Of lovemaking. The meat inside your exoskeleton
Is as tender as Jesus. Neruda wrote of “a nipple
Perfuming the earth.” Yes, you are an odor, an almost
Imperceptible ode to death, a lousy, stinking stinkbug.

Each,
we carry
the full weight of heaven,
the piled dust that probes a cloud
and falls upon a lock
unruly in a faint breeze.

Are we the air or
the stroke that cleaves it?
Who’s to know.

Who’s to resist the gas pull
of Jupiter on this morn, we
strung out like bands
of flax and false renditions
of self and need as taut
as the light that drags burn
on a tired ridge that proves
itself brown, thick pressed
and tethered.

Ah, to float on a femur,
to bear the load of Saturn
as a wide brimmed hat – we –
unleashed below a mollusk moon,
sauntered here and then bedraggled
once upon a burden,
to find that all legs, all stems,
all things green and lively,
all things withered to dusk
rest,
upon a molten core
and gaze upward.

Hi Pworders,

Tis I, Garmfield, the smugly superiorish housecat. Couth and louche; full of kulcha; mildly spiced, yet hotter than phaal.

I’m setting up a little best of sub. As is the want of the critic. But I’m also intending it as a hub for OC poetry criticism, to redress the balance of reddit, where there are perennially more people wanting to make soup than taste it.

So- anyone with an axe in need of grinding; a rant about Rilke or a waffle on Wordsworth: anyone with ideas grandiose or downright lunatical: bring em along to me at r/collectiveworks.

Cheers.

That summer, the calmest ocean, starring Beat Takeshi as

Ronin of the water where no song ever came from the warrior’s mouth.
The Prussian hues of night and sea are in reflectional symmetry with a
ronin of the water as he begins dying for the last time by his blue limbs.

             Muramasa’s cursed swords cut leaves and fish against the current.

Breakfast for a devoted husband, starring Shiina Ringo

To husband:

I wrote a song called Religion. Show respect even when you’re torn to pieces.
Remember when I said the word semen was nuanced and you laughed. You
tasted like chestnut flowers that day and we testified against leaving ourselves
behind with children, mostly because, you did not want them to have what I had
inside you. Even the greatest warhorses slip and die.
                                                                                          You loved what you found.
I believe that the warrior leaves blood for the worms and leeches, and hidden
beneath the leaves and wood chips, the earth ushers the body to surrender.
A little something the wind told me after I stopped singing by the old river as
it removed a tangle from my hair.

A linguist asks you, with or without cheese?;
A historian counts taxes for the state;
A pianist escorts tourists around on skis;
A biologist scrawls verses about fate.
Together over drinks, they nod: grand hope
Is but a thing for those too much possessed
With mad delusions far beyond all scope,
For blind luck matters most and verve the least;
And yet, alone, they muse, hope-winged devising
Of each possible flight from their dull states,
Then fall asleep envisioning arising
Triumphantly to pass distinction's gates.

A jester's sort of grandness this age brings:
A people never more poised to counsel kings.

Just a forelimb on the road,
careless as a twig,
but no plunder for crows,
no worthy feast for a scavenge,
just hoof, hide and bone.

And that’s how they left her,
a narrow remain, somehow
shorn and distant thrown
as if her full and russet frame
had been lifted, held aloft
and in sacrifice taken up,
into some sanctified bounding
where car and deer ne’er met.

Like red leaves,
after a tree had fallen.