Encroachment on a Dry Source by Raymond Farr

Encroachment on a Dry Source

Raymond Farr

1:
The traffic was just so
Dumb fucking mind numbing

& every night I was somebody's headache
I was looking for the ragged truth of the matter

To take me by my hand & lead me off
To where I'd be glad just to be alive

But all September was was a bad iron taste
Something I might have said to someone

But couldn't quite recall exactly what
& so every night I made a fire of laughter

A poem out of snake bites
The same silence burning the rivets loose

From the two worlds of the bridge I would cross
& so I talked to myself

& I passed unnoticed
My senses bathed in the blood

Of the wolves of my thoughts
It wasn't a religious motive I had in my heart

I wanted to make clear
Something out of the ordinary—

Like corn flakes for instance
I only needed a laugh track

2:
Moving out of the dark digital trees in silence—
The sound of a real bird!

Like someone crinkling sheets
Of rumpled cellophane! & the same intense echo—

How enchanting it all seemed—everything so real!

& whenever we spoke it was like Time stopped
But nobody saw the flaws in our thinking

& like wolves on a keyboard we encroached on a dry source at sunset
& all the shut-down roads veered into the same shallow canyon

Where no one risked going

In this forest of JPEGs—
The dandelions swerved into us head-on like yellow cars wrecking us

In this abyss of fresh leaves we jump started April

We deleted our SPAM

& hoped that our poems would sing for their supper
It may have been snowing

Our own heads may have been talking
What was left on our hard drives was falsehood not weather—

A vivid abandoned kill blocking the highway

Raymond Farr is author of Ecstatic/.of facts (Otoliths 2011), & Writing What For? across the Mourning Sky (Blue & Yellow Dog 2012). A chapbook, Eating the Word NOISE! is slated for February 2015 publication by White Knuckle Chaps & Poetry in the Age of Zero Grav is due out from Blue & Yellow Dog in mid 2015. He is editor of Blue & Yellow Dog.

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