BUT MOST BEAUTIFUL OF ALL
the browning edges of the photograph are the
outskirts of a map, in which
may be found the beasts and drooping trees living
green in the memory
and we inhabit those regions, completely forgotten
until once again
we glance into that other world and return to that
day that
haunts us at the edge of a table, which pretends to
go unnoticed
but now we are aware, and this awareness is an
elevator that
carries us upward in our minds
what we resemble most upon realizing these invented
scents
at the cliff’s edge is that a photograph is a
scalpel
performing the most delicate operation.
GLOTTAL DIAMOND
At the core of couches
your white radish thought alive with plentiful
owls. In the flaming crotch
of chance
the hot kinetic speech monkey
newly fused and erotic
yes, you heard right
chews the winged ethical conundrum
called alive
You’ve tormented
seizures, doused
confusion,
especially, with
paradisal poems
Not scrying, or sitting in
a sound bath, listening to the magnetic plumage’s
stony ligature
sucking an incandescent virginity
you failed our czarist tarantula
protested invalidated simulations
electronic kitten pots
buried hyperactive bonfires
and so we wait.
BEE MACHINE
machine for making disdain
machine for making love
machine for making meadow grass
machine for making gardens
machine for making rock
machine for making music
machine for making bees
machine for making obviousness
machine for making night
machine for making god
machine for making excavations
machine for making judgment
machine for making Chicken Kiev
machine for making distances
machine for making pink
machine for making sleep
machine for making dreams
machine for making light.
SLEEPING WITH HISTORY
I have given up sleep and now
continuously walk waking up
keeping me awake these tired lines
which prop my gargantuan eyes
Once a woman called to me
sleep, sleep, but I said unequivocally
I must witness the whole of life this waking
dream, after she ignored me.
BLOWTORCH
contradictions of
frozen strawberries here
walking along Michigan avenue
which moves like a Mozart sonata
not No. 16 in C major too familiar
for this rarity of
December air
its frosty fidelity as I think about
putting a suit and tie
on my loneliness and going out
but stay inside with
a cup of yesterday's razor sharp worries but now
I'm walking again and nothing
seems transcendent it all seems dull
but I remember now, too this reification
while walking through this
poem that now has such tired eyes
I'm hungry for comfort.
Apollinaire wrote of the gamy
meatballs
of memory, and I think of Chicago's lost coyotes
and listen to frozen
bells sparkling through the streets mothering
my shivering words
shouting at posterity.
Larry Sawyer/ poetry and literary reviews have appeared in publications including Action Yes, The Argotist (UK), The Chicago Tribune, Coconut, Court Green, Esque, Exquisite Corpse, Hunger, Jacket (Australia), The Miami Sun Post, MiPoesias, The National Poetry Review, Outlaw (UK), The Prague Literary Review (Czech Republic), Rain Taxi, Shampoo, Skanky Possum, Tabacaria (Portugal), Van Gogh's Ear (France), Vanitas, VLAK (Czech Republic), Ygdrasil, and elsewhere. His work appeared in The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (anthology, Cracked Slab Books, 2007). Convulsive Editions will soon publish a poem as a broadside with visual art by Allyssa Wolf. He’s curated the Myopic Books Poetry Reading Series in Wicker Park, Chicago since 2005, and has hosted readings there nearly every weekend that have included poets such as Eileen Myles, Ron Silliman, Cole Swensen, and Bernadette Mayer, as well as many Chicago-area poets. His debut collection, Unable to Fully California (cover art by Krista Franklin), is available on Otoliths Press (Australia). An ebook, Werewolf Weather (cover art by Gary Sullivan), recently appeared as an Argotist ebook. Sawyer also edits milk magazine (since 1998) with Lina ramona Vitkauskas and has published work by a wide variety of international poets and artists including Charles Bernstein, Jerome Rothenberg, Bill Berkson, Pierre Joris, and Wanda Coleman. Larry coordinated an online installation of the work of Japanese surrealist Yamamoto Kansuke for milk: the only online magazine granted permission to do so by the artist’s estate. Larry has read his work at venues such as the BONK! Reading and Performance Series in Racine, Wisconsin; the Chicago Printer's Row Lit Fest; Columbia College Chicago; The Hideout in Chicago; Myopic Books in Chicago; The Poetry Center of Chicago; Quimby's Bookstore in Chicago; The School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee.
