If you’ll indulge me, I’m going to dispense with politics today. There’s been death in family and I figure we can all use a break from political viewpoints now and then (yes?). Today, I’m thinking more about both the smallness and the largeness of the individual life, and how each of our little consciousnesses contain within them so much more than we can possibly express or understand—and how they radiate outward with a force that even we, as its containers, cannot contain.
And so here I gingerly place three loosely connected poems upon the vast river that speeds us all through time, whether we swim against the current or not. As always, thanks for reading.
THE MAN
Balloonman
chickenman
soul-lit man
hey man
me man
head turning astral man
I spotted a leaf-couched
sunken-toothed man
sinking into a floor
a forest
soft needles and
he laughed
with ground gurgling
and questioned me through the ground’s maw:
what kind of man are you?
What man comes out your eyes when you
Go down
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I, HE, THE MANY
I was a shape-shifting sky sprinter
I breathed electricity
and shed loose tears on scraggly fields of your hometown
I was a comely curmudgeon
I snapped at children on their way to school
and twisted my alligator cane
around the lamp-post
I was a desperate rock ‘n’ roller
I snuck around the back alley,
tripped over a garbage lid
and street-sprawled my way to sonic abandon
I was a professor in a tear suit leaning
against a wall
my heart tugged at the sleeves of passers-by,
begging an audience in vernacular
I was a wet black solid shade
I fell
and crackled
and slit the unconscious earth
I was the unconscious earth
I opened one eye and drowsily
wrapped myself around everything that is
A COLOR UTTERED, EVERYTHING TOUCHED
Scattershot blue rolls too
you know
rhythm-splash-turn over the tongue
bounces off a
jump-bent knee then
up over the head
spherically caressing the backside
all
the
way
down
to ground
Don’t look back
don’t look down
walk forward
close your eyes
See the puddle ripple over earth-cracks
unknown
spoken color seeping
spoken color expanding
spoken color leaving nothing
dry
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Stephen Boni
