In those days, keyboard-patterned red shoes
Were worn out of respect for a bygone
Prerogative. The people were forced
To live on grubs from their own bodies,
As these were the only things that didn't reject
The presence of their stomach, hands, lips, eyes.
We kept compulsively opening the flowers,
Like the pimples we had left with the day before,
Day 2 in the dermatologist's office. We felt like fish
Whose memory extended more than five seconds
Into the past, the dust spinning whorls around us
In siroccos dating from 1927 or 1928. The ciphers
Coursed over "les vagues" in a triangle
With no thinking to it. And then there was The Room
Where courageously you woke up
To a dinner's worth of frustrated compliments.
The mist looked in at us from the summer cabin,
But was it really summer? A wide open field
Filled with tiny white wildflowers in endless repetition.
Panic was the mother of all things,
Expressionless and without choice. A cannibal truck-driver
With the ordinary grace of a man, or any ordinary man,
In a world that was a garden. I didn't want to be a victim,
Nor corrupted by Mr. Sociology,
The man whose head expanded, & who gently took in
The stars overhead, like tiny mouse hands with broken knuckles.
"Have you gone away from music completely?" he asks.
from the lamp of a lily will emerge a prince so great
that the waterjets will ennoble the factories
and a leech self-mutating into a tree of disease
i'm looking for the root my lord unmoving lord unmoving
why then yes you will learn come in spirals toward the useless tear
humid parrot
cactus of lignite inflate between the horns of the black cow
the parrot digs hollows in the tower the saintly mannequin
in the heart there's a child—a lamp
the doctor says he won't last the night
then he departs in short angular lines silence formation silently
when the hunted wolf rests on the linen
the elected hunts his enclosures
showing the flora exit of the death that will be the cause
and the cardinal of france will appear the three lilies fulgurous clearness electric virtue
long dry redness combing fish and letters in disguise
the giant the leprous of the landscape
stops between two cities
he has some streams rhythm and the turtles in the hills heavily amass
he spits some kneaded sand his woolen lungs lightening
the soul and the nightingale whirl in his laughter—sunflower
he wants to pick the rainbow my
heart is a paper star
in missouri in brazil in the west indies if you think if you're happy reader
you become for a moment clear
your brain a clear sponge and in this clarity there will be another clarity
further ahead
further when a new animal will blue in this clarity
Jeffrey Grunthaner currently resides in Bushwick, Brooklyn. He's had work published in a variety of print and online publications, and also gigs around in musical projects, playing a soi-disant deconstructed guitar after the manner of Rudolph Grey and Arto Lindsay. He's currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at Brooklyn College.