Filip Marinovich
THE BALLAD OF ANKLE LAKE
I made myself into a character named Ankle Lake.
It made autumnal sense.
It made eternity tense up its wet sentient plaster forehead
As the worry lines disappeared from it
Becoming timelines portending
Vast improvements in architecture's improvisations
Which had to evolve beyond imitating goose migration.
The tenth floor felt vibration constantly
On top of the building of twenty one floors
Falling down like a nightjar,
A building in Manhattan
That had to get braces
Because it was made up without foundation.
Because I made out with him like a hymnal lapping at the milking wind
He woke up inside a vibrating massage chair.
He woke up inside her vibrating medicine cabinet mirror.
The tweezers lit up everything:
They couldn't stop reflecting
The End.
The Nightjar is known by many names :
The Fern Owl, the Wheeler, the Nightchurr
And the Door Hawk.
But the oldest is surely the Goatsucker.
Just now it was thought
Nightjars would drink milk
Directly from goats,
Poisoning them so their udders wasted away
And they went downstairs into one of the meeting rooms
For a full day and then not for a full day,
An architectural misery causing a gazillion safety pin inhabitants.
Where are all these people
On the bottom of the right hand screen for me?
The only display that makes sense is the gallows display.
We say the same "MAYDAY, MAYDAY."
Oh, you know what I get
If I show non-video people?
Gallery display names showing no video.
Personally I think it's very nude.
They do what they are, but
Here's my interpenetration:
If they don't make themselves there
They solidify their place
In the not-actually-there.
It's not like they're there
And turning their camera off,
It's that they're not there.
Wrong.
But we're
Dealing with the same time like a blind date.
This is the first time he listened as a moth.
This is the first time
A forklift uses your energy
When you walk sideways
Under the pine
Sparrow I can't hear you
Under the coniferous spy
Retrieving your portable makeup table
And summer neck pillow
Blossoming from your window seat
And aisle seat simultaneity
In a feat of high altitude gardening.
A cabin flower can bake with you
Even if you don't let it
And it will pollenate you
Whether you're
Bumblebee imposter
Or the real buzzer candy.
Thirty seven deck chairs retrieved from the pine tops at night
Could not save you
From the hurricane's chess knight breasts.
In its L-shaped foreplay jumps
It can sup on figures
And make them crunch
Even the bishop's diagonal run.
Outside the square of squares
The laughing mantis
Bites off its mate's head
And procreates new mates
To repeat this
Never again.
Surviving mating season's violet syringes
Your hair reaches out to you,
Gets its greasy branches all over you,
Stuffs you into a funeral suit
And says
"Go worship your uncle now that he's dead
The last five years you couldn't talk to him
He insisted your demented father was not demented
Now Dad's still demented and Uncle is cement bread
In E Flat Major's Mess
The caryatids refuse to drag the wagons west
Because they are covered wagons
But if we could get convertible dragons
No
The caryatids are in your carotid artery
And carry only
Your jugular out of your body."
Throwing your corpse into a marble quarry
They say
"See how you like being sculpture
Holding up your civilized law building."
The caryatids never speak in chorus
Each one says individually
"I need my teeth,"
But you don't know which one
It sounds from
Coming from all of them
Once
One
Breathes.
ENSO
The zen circle is the only thing
can momentarily save me from poetry circles
but nothing can save me from zen
except death
which, thanks to zen,
is no-death
and no-birth
and no person here
walking into each tree in the coyote woods
as coyote trees walk through me
not once becoming me-trees
though they embrace me
with red sap gloves and silvery fur ear buds.
"Human huggers,"
the rocks call them
as they laugh
in the rock audience paths along erupting root systems,
the downed eucalyptus hotel for summering ants,
and incoming catalpa bath cloud taps.
JELLY
Aunt Wisdom trapped me into
A late night kitchen conversation.
She said
"Nenad my ex-husband, your uncle, died
And now I'll never again be that person
Who went with him
To give birth to our second son.
Nenad was such a huge person
Then he disappeared.
At night I see the dead.
They start as jellyfish
Swarming around my bed.
Then a highbeam eye appears
From the core pucker hole of the jelly
Gazing at me.
Then the jellyfish pucker mouth gives birth
To the wilted face of dead boy blondie.
Then a ceiling-tall white gown
And at the top three heads :
The center, a cow head,
The left, a chicken head,
The right, a chicken head also,
And they converse by moving their mouths
And beaks respectively
But no sound comes out."
Oh, thank you, that goes in the poem!
I have no imagination left
So I'm completely dependent on what other people tell me.
You've been working toward this moment
Your whole life.
He used to be a charlatan but now he's a poet.
Filip Marinovich (aka Wolfman Librarian, aka Bathtub Nebula,) is the author of Four full length poetry books: The Suitcase Tree, Wolfman Librarian, And If You Don't Go Crazy I'll Meet You Here Tomorrow, and Zero Readership, An Epic. He teaches the roaming poetry seminar "Shakespearian Motley College" at Torn Page in New York City.
