POEM: "Your Photograph"

Your Photograph


ah that's

easy what

you’ve got there

is a camel 

a picture of

a castration

awful cries

now cut off

the male joins

forever not

a sex but a

dumb community

of burden

now cut off

or else it’s

(one version)

a simple melée 

of camels
like Les says
brutal policy
like inferior art
knows whose
fault it all is

slow diversion

local motorcade

now cut off

the ambassador’s

the tactics

the policies

all a bit too

bloody slow

© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Meena Alexander Poem

Night Theater

Snails circle

A shed where a child was born.

She bled into straw –
Who can write this?

Under Arcturus, 

Rubble of light:

We have no words 

For what is happening –

Still language endures

Celan says

As he stood in a torn

Green coat

Shivering a little,

In a night theater, in Bremen.

(2012)

POEM: "Get On The Plane"

Get On The Plane
                                  
                                       for Greg Gamage


To overegg the ____
Only I can't think of the what
The lily, the moment, the cooking
The face that isn't looking

Mooncake, new case or the dog
Is it their door on Halloween?
Christmas or the New Year coming
Some other place they haven't been

My mate Greg was right I guess
About the zombies at the airport
Travel is wasted on useless currents 
Overegg it all and get away with it
James Bond in a cool white suit
I think I’ll leave the martinis alone
So many broken eggs I’m unmoved
Pity about the shitty legroom though.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Brian Henry Poem

Corona

The opening (read: aperture)
is open by design (read: default),
so susceptible to departure

with the brain floating, bag of salt,
loud, malleable light, the sky profuse
in its movement from rim to vault,

an orb (read: void) open to obtuse
approach from any outer corridor
(read: vector), as if angle could produce

what sight announces as visitor,
a gravity-infected flash, or fleck,
that, focused, becomes meteor,

the surface less limit than wreck,
the eye a crash site, open to air,
onto a sky that will not reflect.


(2012)

POEM: "Overcast"

Overcast


Of the moments
that restored my
faith in humanity
I think I'll remember
one or two of them
& this second one just
left me wondering whether
she was really better off
(she didn't listen to me
now she lives in Germany)
first one's hidden
sorry it's the terms
of my dumb faith
just starting to rain
take it with a grain of salt.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

POEM: "Aside"

Aside


You read of a guy who wrote
a novel of 80 thousand pages
who couldn’t work out the ending
even so he managed to say it
& he even mentioned this too
the deficiencies you’re feeling
in the rose garden of doubt
arc and mise-en-scène
a dog’s old toy in the yard.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Ben Doller Poem

Parochial Poetry

Whiter I make it when walking right in
unswerved, sweating fluorescent bleach,
preaching a moon page that says its welts:
learn this by heart is empty but do it
to do it. I make it somehow whiter, zombied
and I opified allover the absolutely
whitest room. I say keep your lines in line
and look at me now just lining them,
some flogged orthodoxen, ploughed
down sillion shiny sacerdotal lines
I'm supposed to like and looky I do.
I like what I like. I just like what I like.
I like to say look: dissident anachronistics,
shambolic stuff in master rows but look
at me. I even early balded to enhance
the interrogation. I meander in and form more
order. I like to point with my pointer, to
indicate. The most afraid I like to get is
a little bit. I app my accounts and survey
the advantage. I tower under.
I oxiclean the ivory. I shower and shower.
I dig on fonts. I wake up singing I say
never start with that but one morning
I wake up singing the Fat Boys. I wikipede
The Fat Boys. One of them is no longer.
The other is no longer fat. I assess the Human
beatbox via a Schwittersian optic.
I exercise my massive rights. I have the right
to remain. I remain. I interview just
like a glacier. I hand dance. I like just
what I like. My skin is white not. It fits
just tight. It burns on will. My horizon
is fungible. My will is like whatever.
My SPF is infinity. People seem to like
me. I was just born just this way.

(2012)

POEM: "Death"

Death 

Never again to say
I missed you so much 
Or, sleep on your own damn side.

© 2012 Rob Schackne

An Adam Fell Poem (1)

Corporation

                        I don't know how to say 

how I feel politely, or poetically, or without 

the jugular and collapse of the immediate 

heart, so tonight, I won't say anything at 

all. Just stare out the window at our 

stunned little writhe. Hold back the 

strongest urge to knock out a few of the 

capitol's most critical walls, replace its 

fiber optic cables with lightning bugs, 

replace the investment bankers all with 

bunker busters. I lock eyes with the 

capitol's bright and empty rooms and admit 

that, sometimes, deep in my affluent, 

American cells, I miss my body carved to 

projectile. I miss trebuchet shoulders and 

knuckles flaked to arrowheads, miss my 

hands massive and molded from molten to 

the bolts of ballistas. I miss blackjack and 

cudgel and quarterstaff and flintlock. I miss 

pummel and pike and I am not proud of 

this. I know it's not a healthy feeling. I try 

to un-arm, to un-cock. I try to practice my 

breathing. I try The Master Cleanse, The 

Stationary Bike, The Bikram Sweat, The 

Contortion Stretch, The Vegan Meatloaf, 

The Nightly, Scorching Bath, The Leafy 

Greens and Venom Television, The Self-

Mutilation of a Winter's Run, but we can 

only cleanse our bodies so much before we 

realize it's not our bodies that need 

detoxing.

(2012)

A Samuel Greenberg Poem

Conduct

By a peninsula the painter sat and

Sketched the uneven valley groves.
The apostle gave alms to the
Meek. The volcano burst
In fusive sulphur and hurled
Rocks and ore into the air—
Heaven’s sudden change at
The drawing tempestuous,
Darkening shade of dense clouded hues.
The wanderer soon chose
His spot of rest; they bore the
Chosen hero upon their shoulders,
Whom they strangely admired, as
The beach-tide summer of people desired.

(1915)

POEM: "Rehearsal"

Rehearsal


Alright I’ve said it the ass
depends upon the legs like
a clock on a minute’s notice
the banjax awaits the band
there’s nothing new under
the sun except the sun while
we’re roaring like monsters
dammit you didn’t know it
now I say it the form attends
an invisible quiet thing.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Louise Glück Poem

The Night Migrations 

This is the moment when you see again
the red berries of the mountain ash
and in the dark sky
the birds' night migrations.

It grieves me to think
the dead won't see them—
these things we depend on,
they disappear.

What will the soul do for solace then?
I tell myself maybe it won't need
these pleasures anymore;
maybe just not being is simply enough,
hard as that is to imagine.


(2006)

POEM: "The Afternoon"

The Afternoon


Why you were an hour late
planned to shuck your husband
to meet me later in the room
I felt strangely neutral like I was
your husband wanting to know
why it takes 2 hours to buy rice
after when you were a bag of rice
we were just a pair of stomachs
& we looked out of the window
there was a man painting
his balcony red in the rain
the sky was mostly grey &
not much chance of letting up.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Shanna Compton Poem

Panoramic View


Last week Mars suddenly got a lot closer.
It used to be the place we'd throw out
as impossible, utterly unreachable, so red
and foreign and sere. Not anymore.
And I'm trying to figure out why watching
the panorama makes something in the hot core
of me crumple like a swig-emptied can,
intoxicating though it may be, vibrant
with out-of-this-world color like the whole thing's
a sand painting, a dimensional mandala
some galactic monk took her sweet time pouring
freehand, blowing on it between sips of her tea,
ruffling up the most dramatic of its rumpled crests.
It's bluer than I thought, attained. Like most things
I wish we could take back.


(2012)

POEM: "Archy In The House"

Archy In The House

this long hard climb 

youre on how much 

further do you have to go 

good lord i hope that 

youre not entirely on 

your own the poems i

mean they help like 

flowers do so never 

dismiss that comfort   

in the speak tonight i

saw a chinese guy regale 

his birthday gal with a

bouquet of toy bunnies

but nothing she could

do till they got home

© 2012 Rob Schackne