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eleemosynary

flyfires, nontree.

Shannon Baker

flyfires, nontree.
by shannon baker
fibersongs foam with hysteria.
thousands seek personal freedom in agriculture.
but (not
here of course, someplace
else perhaps)
if you happen to fertilize, wellthen (and you
do
happen to)
an impossible collection will result.
if needed see
how there’s the long kid
gets mcdonalds sexy
i mean
shit
the street can eat you.
there’s a
distance between charged tissues
in every
thing a mouth, in every
mouth the
excrement of oblivion.
gone to oil your jawhinge i get
one rise
from the moanshift it takes
two full minutes (if morning ever
came again) to decide between
your ache
& mine.
crowning tufts we are
half arcs of cloudsugar.
the chewing joint,
a device for absorption, violence curling under
neath some patient race.
revolving daycost
unrescued from the wide ebb of
fact indulgence.
looking out there are bones (always)&
stowaways (often)
&(sometimes) elderlies with flags.
now supposed
a neutering (shadow
moved by light)
maybe then i’d want
them to grow me,
dark intending.
familial plague, indifference.
hands out of everything
and sill worn
must wear
cell-shavings, lithium
whitelump turns cold inside diagnosed homedeath.
(expecting the true nature of dogs&angels)
you will have to watch but
you will want to.
recognition or something equally terminal. rarely discovered
(steamfilled, the tragedy)
velocity smugglers from beyond our arm of the ocean they
twitch,
legs out, dicks dripping
what
nonsense this must seem
to those animals who got
stuck together
and lived.
(he has made me sick) i have
made him sick also.
very soon he will find it.
he will make his own plain craving to embrace and,
yowling,
seek the final brim
alone,
knowing
the silence.
knowing the silence should have gone first.

0 thoughts on “flyfires, nontree.”

  1. interesting/telling as always. flighty in retrospect. retrospect is important. the great poems are the ones that you come back to, read more than once. few.
    your endings are getting better. remember how we discussed this in great length and ref. roald dahl as a good example. read “switch bitch” to refresh. read eduardo galeano as not to forget the past.

  2. Bits and pieces as an idiom is indicative of the imaginative mind in its normal frantically ecstatic state. People slave over nirvana to create ‘enlightenment poetry’ from the calm after the storm…that has its appeal, but ‘sturm und drang’ has much to offer as well, and i think more. I prefer the hard-to-consume as opposed to the instantly recognized. Take it past the conventional 4-5 lines and let all multiple personalities have a say. The easily understandable most often lacks character. This poem, however, has some layers to it.
    As always, it’s stimulating to observe another poet who has an idea of style and who can create something unique. For Shannon Baker i think it would have to be the compound words artistically married to one another creating a fireworks of image and thought. …It’s not just imagery, but some deep existential thought to go along with it. like ‘moanshift’ and ‘cloudsugar’ ..and title, obviously. Coming together with a statement: “crowning tufts we are half arcs of cloudsugar.
    the chewing joint, a device for absorption, violence curling under neath some patient race.”
    At beginning section of poem, there is a staccato momentum breaker in use of parenthetical thoughts and asides…again, more a mirror of the darting ‘here-there’ mindset than some flow-easy stock market piece appealing to the herds gaining acceptance into academic journals the whole kingdom over. Break the mold. good! And it’s not just personal psychology here, there’s world awareness…nice to see a poet go beyond that convention and write for humanity too.
    Also there is an apparent cognizance on writer’s part to escape the ‘cliche’ thru syntax/structure (some inversion)…it’s a jolting of waves, wind, particle beams the reader must crank with CPR intensity, cause they want to.
    Perfect poem for ‘going back to’ i.e. re-reading finding something different etc. all that jazz. Complete opposite of ‘flighty’ i would think. Every reader’s different. And i suppose it’s what you want…express and share a common bond of life…or make it into ‘Paris Review’. I say keep your balls and write what is ‘you’, and fuck the ‘Paris Review’.

  3. I loved the visual of this so much I created a painting based largely on it. I compared your work to one by Christopher Smart (For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry).
    It is of a foreshorten orange tabby posed with a centrally emphasized firefly perched on the cat’s paw. This night scene is titled “The Proposal”. I’ll send you a jpeg of it if you wish. My email address is embedded with the link under my name on the comments page.

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