october robinia

october leaves

coming outside
to sit in the sun
and all at once
being covered as
a genuine gentle
breeze blows
through the false
acacia and makes
its sudden shower
of real leaves

i want to say
it’s the simple
things and say
this to myself
and only for me
so that no one
else hears how
it sounds in the
drawing out of
an autumnal tree

as when some do
they’ll think all
is fine and good
when instead the
simple things are
less than being
agreed because
writing in this
seasonal way is
a death of irony

William Burroughs’ Cut-Up

wbpic

This is from The Floating Bear small press magazine (1961 – 69), edited by Diane di Prima and LeRoi Jones, and new to me. With thanks to Derek Beaulieu who tweeted this link to free downloads of all of the magazines. This cut-up is from Issue 5, and there are other WB poems as well as a host of contemporaries across the series. I have only started looking through…

Moons

Nearly Moon

The farfetched moon,
a moron,
nearly rotund

and neurotic – its light
miraculous,
an endogenous crescent.

Mulling over this
fraud with its farfetched
parabolic saga.

Tone of the May Supermoon

Flower moon / hare moon /
mother’s moon / corn planting moon / milk moon
who is telling the truth?

Speech illuminating
and cream of the
last trios.

With a supermoon this bright
it would seem impossible to cast doubt’s darkness,
but there are those well versed in deceit.

Final for this year,
but only in its
roundness and this perigee.

Technically, to be
what is, it must practise the least
physical distancing.

The brightest
superlative: flowers and bloom
and hopefulness.

It is the tone that makes an
honest moon, especially when heard for
what is rather than imagined.

Political Moonshot

The moon does
have its own pull, more poetic lore
than its iron core

and a gravity formed
from the debris of its astronomical
birth; more like

another mutant
on the block of hopeless metaphor.
We have been before

because it is,
and within a shot as achievable
as that is too:

I mean,
phenomenal. So this terrestrial aim
is no more than name in

being unfeasible,
more like a photo op than an orbit
to attain, more Luna

than the tic
toc of a countdown that will fail;
poetry that rhymes

just for how it sounds.
There is no fury, and the bare bore
is just this.

September Sails

The sails are
down, the last dead flies held until
this fall,

and September’s
grey light can now illuminate a space
unhindered.

No Mariner or
other figure passes this way today –
the stunted

discarded too,
along with what is over-long and the
unnecessary

profligacy in
their growing. Other shades have been
wrapped and

bagged for
storage, opening up a further vista
on the outdoors.