sorabji.com » Poems

The Future Will Be Deleted

sorabji — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 06:27:25 +0000

I saw Russia while
lying like a
masturbated pancake,
exhausted,
across a
Florida Interstate

From that vulnerable
driveway of death I saw
every vein in my eyelids, and
wildly predicted my life’s ports of call:
Antarctica,
Louisiana,
Cuba,
New York
(always New York City)

grafted flax

bruised quarter

liberal pumpkin

vile condom

thickness of highway thieves

I see 2:27 through the speakers, these
“Wild Nights” that
raged inarticulate in
grade school poetry
return alive to my November

everything is deletable
everything is deleted

in the future all things will be
deleted

Judith Griggs?
deleted

reflections of myself
lurking
between the
window and the
screen?
delete.

look at tomorrow,
look out the window,
all things deleted,
all things deleted.

Good Morning

sorabji — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 14:45:13 +0000

You own what is left of the irresponsible asides,
the lunging gossip and the hoary retorts. They
addle your relationship with the greatness of
resignation, the satisfaction of ignorance, the
simple joys of disdain and unspoken tribulations.
You remembered the words, each one, as they
rose up from your unplacid sleep, biting your
morning as it never quite unfolded, the motion of
opening your eyes blended with the hurtling of
every life that surrounds you, the automatic
scream of blandness at hard, upturned buckets of
blindness and plundered rain washing through the
porches and the alleys, threatening spaces between
windows left wide open to boiling sounds of
vanity passing through the screens and moving
airborne through your lustless cascades of unproven
accusations, unsubstantiated rumors and bony
lies that litter your passageways through life,
crippling plain meanings with dull vibrations, the
depressed dishes of consciousness and vitality you
expect to replenish with vitamins you learned about
on the bus and in the public bathroom, overhearing
mashes of conversation among individuals unaware of
each other, unaware of your confluence which
intertwined their unrelated mundane comments into
terroristic conspiracies, medical advice, health tips and
priestly exhortations to mumble 50 rosaries after you
gently close the door to the public toilet stall, reading
profundities in the overlapping entrails of graffiti and
health department directives, hearing the chatter of
strangers as spiritual guidance, lifting you higher than
every unquestioned falsehood of which your fabric is
sewn, those menacing interactions of unlubricated
danger imperiling only your humblest moments of
silence and kinetic solitude, forces encroaching on the
philosophy of perpetratorless vandalism scratching
tuneless waltzes into admixtures of confused conversations,
bluntly stroking the direction of summary judgments and
precisely identical words toward concomitant separation.

80 Times

sorabji — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 14:58:30 +0000

when the music’s over.
shut the snap on the useless travel satchel.
until the end
i see me in a hoary motel room
pecking at a tiny keyboard, the
text landing far away,
deposited as evidence and
ceaseless accumulation,
invisible to me.

I don’t want to see it.
Like Dmitry Kolesnikov,
the Russian naval officer who wrote
“I am writing blind”
as the Kursk transformed from a
submarine into a
cylindrical crypt
I, too, will inexplicably scrawl text to the last,
I shall face my
motel room demise with an
overhead light
or a miner’s cap
or i shall hold the phone just so
so as to light the keys
so so.

a subway roars overhead
I see its glimmering reflection in a
glass doorway.
I am away from home, I am not far but
to me a “travel” can be
30 feet from home,
why must travel be to another land?
adventure needs no special place.
am I on the road when my
bed is but 100 yards away?
off the road?

“the road” reminds me of The Band
and Neil Diamond
their self-important talk of
the road and the stage, that
“god damndest most spiritually psychotic woman you ever saw”
to parameld both entity’s pretentions about their
place of work,
rabbi robertson shoplifting baloney
under his trench coat
with the rest of The Band.
I mean was The Band
such a big deal that I must
listen to them preach, listen to them
supply their own posterity to the
downstream victors who
write and create history,
with talk about
shoplifting baloney
from a grocery store?

“on the road” is a dangerous cliché
summoning in the mind, “American pie”-style,
every single word of the
willie nelson song.
my mother reviled willie nelson
and over time I came to agree that
“Always On My Mind”
is a scrawl of misogyny in which
mr. nelson tenderly explains

“I ignored you,
I neglected you,
I treated you like a dog,
I may have abused you.
but Iiiiiiiiii was thinkin’ about ya.”

I imagine him tapping his forehead,
theatrically thoughtful,
masculinely self-centered,
grinning like a disaster as he
excuses all with a whitewash.
sorriest love song
ever,
lacking
as it does,
any love.
i saw willie
sing that song at woodstock
yuppie woodstock
tourist woodstock
and the crowd fell silent
contemplative
intellectual
winds of instinct
blowing through their
grins as
willie sang the timeless ballad.

on the bus from
bethel to port authority
i met a man
who had seen willie
seen willie 80 times
seen willie
80 times
and it made him powerful
the man was powerful for he had
seen willie 80 times.
he travelled abroad to see willie,
and travel, too, made this man
ever more powerful,
ever more the authority for
all things willie.
I knew his type and i
let him preach,
let him nourish history with
his accounts of willie as a young man,
willie in washington, d.c.,
willie on television,
willie at his finest and
willie at his worst.
“I seen him 80 times now.”

Virtuoso

sorabji — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 14:11:33 +0000

I found you in that gray yard, politely brimming,
policing the clearings in a stranger’s house.
Listening to the radio you wanted to intercept
the meaning of what was heard, the anthill-like
spaces, deep, filled by the chatter of announcers,
and you saw the sound fade, its colors hung.
A hidden doorway threw itself open.
No one entered. Only you saw this escape hatch
from surveillance, a thing which to you is common
but to most is an invisible intruder. Wide.
You considered your mistakes and lined them out
as pellets rifled from a slingshot yet hidden in a
chastity chamber at a church hostel. Dust harangued
you, chanting your failures with a priestly poll but
saving its tricks for those illusions you can not
create by yourself. Inside. Nickels and stones
deserted you but dust settled on the dull grin
you shared with a fellow traveler, a patient
on the bus who knew your name without asking
and who sat in the ugly gloaming, arms crossed,
delivering litanies of a trauma long rested but
which endlessly reflects on its own suffering.
Nothing is left of your decisions. Empty chairs and
gravel sewage blink from saying yes to your
flashes of freedom and you bury the results in a
comic book, in full color Sunday Best, the
colorful tempest lurking beneath the
sullen joys of your slowly repeating youth.

Aad de Gids

sorabji — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 18:28:36 +0000

HEAD CREAMED UNDER GRILLED HONEY . FLAMBÉ JAZZ BRUSSELS PANTS ASUNDER FRESH THUGS OF DISDAIN SELF-LOATHING PICKING MORALITY PUNS SQUASHED UNDER COFFEE AND VICE . ON CRUXES OF GHOSTS I LUMBERED, A PHANTOM THROUGH THE MOMENTS OF MY LIFE, A DARK TRICKLE OF EXPERIENCE WASHED INTO DUSTY TUBES OF MECHANICALLY IMPOSSIBLE RESURRECTION . PRESSURED HEATHENS RATTLED STUCCO DRAPES TO SIGNAL FOR HELP! HELP! THE LIVING ROOM FLOODED WITH POORLY CRAFTED EXCUSES BUILT ON BACKWARD-FACING LIES JUGGLED HIGH INTO BOILING FREEDOM WITH STAMINA OF INEXPLICABLE MEMORY . CRASHED INTO A LANGUAGE OF RESIDUE OF SCRIPTED DETRITUS OF THEATRICALLY-LIT SOLITUDES RISING UP FROM 5,000 YEARS AGO WHEN BAEDEKER STOMACHS GUIDED CHILDREN AND ARMIES TO FABLED COMPARTMENTS OF SHADOWLESS CHAOS . HOBBLED AMONG BIGOTS AND BELIEVERS ENJOYING LATE LIFE HOBBIES THAT NEEDLESSLY INVOKE ANCESTRAL EXCLAMATIONS TRANSLATED THROUGH THE 62 LANGUAGES OF SILENCE BEFORE TURNING INTO A SPARKLING BURLESQUE PAPERWEIGHT . MY BAILIWICK IS FROST AND MOLD, BUTTER AND BOOKS, BITTERNESS AND BADINAGE, MY PUNY TREACHERIES FOILED BY A PHOSPHORESCENT MILK WARMLY ENGULFING A CENTURY’S THIRST BUT SMEARING THE FUTURE WITH A SUICIDE SMILE THAT HUMS IN ORBITING CATHARSIS .

Easy

sorabji — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 15:11:57 +0000

O dark charlatan,
snap-brimmed flip flops
clapping between the earth and you,
listen,
listen for the vacuum that
forms the
fistfuls of words
frowning in your pockets.

You know the words that
others will understand but
you refuse to arrange them,
decrying them as cheap.

So take it easy.
Handlebars on the platter.
Jugs of rubber on the clockboard.
Singing apples in the church basement.
Acid on the diving board.
Gritted dismissals in the jaw.

Announce your deprivations,
starting from the tic that went
unnoticed in the
first hours of your life and
remained ignored as too obvious.

The tic grew into a bloody circle,
racing darkly to infinity while
never leaving its hiding place,
surging into the consciousness of
anonymity, covering
vicarious lovers with
unredeemable scars.

Asemic Message for April 4, 2010

sorabji — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 00:38:10 +0000

So I Explained

sorabji — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 16:16:19 +0000

I could not sleep and so I explained
it’s part agony,
it’s part hard-on,
it’s the dull buzzers from next year,
it’s the choking miasma of
   unconcoctioned aftershocks
   headfully hustling where
   dancing girls fear to tick,
it’s Ronald Reagan grinning like a
   dust storm under
   rented Chevrolets driven on
   voided alleys and
   computerized fields,
it’s partly the undiscovered farm of
   roosters and sclerotic twitches hovering in
   Major League Baseball’s Maginot Line,
it’s a semiotic legal proceeding where
   meaningless jaw-filling acronyms melt in
   asemic soup,
it’s a fistfight outside a secret nightclub in my
   kitchen where a parade of inconsonance
   suppurates and licks itself with smears of
   government smut,
it’s a cynical children’s dictionary preaching
   slavery and concubinery and halitosis and
   bruise blood and Bukowskian bible verses,
it’s the inert swish of empty gravity
   porously slamming half-read greeting cards.

idiot grimace

sorabji — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:24:12 +0000

idiot grimace
followed violence
burning vibration
hollering streets
choleric frays
nubile crooners
humpty jumps
ice rabies
bowery triumph
spool thump
ablative face
languid Linus

I want a
pine needle
that sounds like
rat forest
that sounds
recyclable
that sounds like
strawberry
sounds like
munchable
looks like
staple friezes
not like
popochondria
much like
bubble placards

plush dominos
tipping like
wealthy seasons
vanish into
thrift shops
a thousand
years from you

I was dreaming of
saliva and bastards
and big hounds of
obscurity
formerly only
available to the
renaissance

I was thinking of
contemporary ephemera
that crunch and
obsessively play
the accordion
when I
bluntly
impugn the
morality of their
human vessel

I calculated the
tempest as the
curtain sailed
impossibly over
your audience,
stripping
lampshades from a
centipede’s guilt and
racing like goldfish
on the
roof of your
mouth

I vanished with the
murdering corpses,
preparing my
unsailed skies for
hidden combat with
filthy church dogs

Uneasily Spoken

sorabji — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:37:14 +0000

If you wrote poetry as a youngster you may be cursed to remember it for the rest of your life. Worse than the laughing stocks of “Exquisite Corpse”‘s Body Bag but not lively enough for kitsch, these verses are literally unspeakable. Their nubile limpidity retains a jingle-jangle innocence. Moments of dark exaltation see you blurt these lines out, some for the first time. You remember. Through guttural croakings of crowded anonymity you joined a pagan crowd, pointing and gyrating toward a New Years orb. In that moment of drowning you spoke your childhood poetry aloud, as familiar to you as Bible verse to a young nun. Like cold coffee poured into a river your words slipped through the crowd.