That could be a lie.

Truth-elusive (or not) vignettes collected in And I Used to Sail Barges available at The Red Ceilings Press here.

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

~

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…

Read the interview here.

Free pdf downloads of erasure resources for NPD and theme of Choice/Choosing here.

With thanks to IT and Rupert for posting another from my found poem collection &there4 here.

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.

~

Glasto eels
generate alternative waves
of psychoactive bliss

via alfresco
piss – ravers who spent in psychedelic
woods where

rivers flow by
as receptacles to abjure
porta-loos and

human queues
in an eco-system now drugged
and ecstatic.

~

The story behind the poem here.