Hazily

Tell me, are you familiar with
the principles of eternal gamification?
No? Well then, I have
quite the reading list for you.

Regrettably, this list doesn’t exist
outside of my feelings for it, doesn’t
exist outside at all. I’ve never been
one to drop the ball so fantastically,
so comprehensively, and yet, here I stand,
before you and the whimpering crowd
behind your back, empty-handed.

We were having such a lovely time too,
mixing this day’s colors with the ones
we siphoned from the street,
eating sun dust from pretty paper bags
and humming ourselves silly
to the off-kilter rhythm of the city.
Leave it to me to spoil our enjoyment
with such a tasteless inquiry.

Were I able to see myself out, I would.
As it stands however, I possess
only this single set of eyes,
which, if they see at all,
see only hazily.

-r. miller

Mention

a taste of cinnamon and something
almost too unimportant to mention

  • John Ashbery

And yet, I did mention it, or
perhaps something similarly
unremarkable. Whatever it was,
the cinnamon flavor lingered
long after the mentioning had passed.

Just what was it, that made
what I’d mentioned so unimportant?
Was it the fact that it waddled along
clumsily, no flowers blooming in its wake?
Or perhaps that it ruffled no feathers
despite the quite sincere effort that it made?

Well, either way, after a week, nobody
remembered what I’d mentioned, or
that I’d mentioned anything at all;
at any rate, they weren’t forth-cooing
with the information, even if they did
remember, which again, is doubtful.
You couldn’t really consider it
a part of history. On the eighth day,

a grand soiree took place in the very space
that mention had been made.
A dizzying variety of teas were served,
as well as erotic fruits, fiddlehead ferns,
and a peculiar strain of absinthe
that turned the tongue iridescent.
Great conversations got muddled in the air.
Everyone’s hair was done up
in fashionable dos that all seemed
to possess a voice of their own. In fact,
they sung so loudly and harmonized
so disastrously that I, without a head
of hair to call my own, was driven
back home, where, waiting alongside
the requisite comforts, was
that thing I mentioned, giving me
a disapproving glare and its knuckles
a hearty, gut-wrenching crack.

-r. miller

Final Straw

Savage prickly things we become
like comely waters surface
dispersed inklings going
out to touch the radius, somewhat
of a radical inclination, invitation
to decline as the worst
was yet over and here you are again

underhandedly spilling to a careful gallop
into polling nooks, necks adrift
and spinning however spun
abject sugar peel.
After which we must steal
whatever architecture
shares a texture with the thunder
oblong drumming in the fade, squeezing.

Can you squeeze a little or a lot harder
why I’ll see you in the next difficulty
without customary diatribe skimming.
So you have to bathe until shimmering,
unless using the cupped deluxe.
While we stay silent by the pruning,
not to dislocate the vanguard.

-r. miller

Blue Light Blues

How’s about a double fist of tedium?
Broken-seeming scenes shifting
in both veracity and viscosity?

Now there’s a funny word,
biding its time, lingering in dim
pockets of our most basic mythology,
where daemons are said to dwell.

Possibly the illimitable hell
that we were promised is a part of this,
somehow, some way.
Terrific poisons fill the space
once designated for speech.
The all-encompassing algorithm
has fixed us in its hungry gaze.

-r. miller

Well This is Awkward

I don’t know how to say it; belles lettres 
came at me like a thousand woolly
caterpillars raining from the treetops.

To think I had been paid only
in restroom farthings, for all the good
in Fort Knox, in the perpetual potty break
that turns these mouths to potties.
Well, er, putties is the term you’re looking for,
so how did you find it?

Truthfully, I found it square,
lately full of lies and miscommunication
to the brink of chemical warfare.

Come to the end,
the sutured preferences,
the withering delights
of all the manic mechanization
going on around this city
of tattered circus tents.

Turbulence or tuberculosis, ye cake-eaters,
pick one and suffer
the enjoyment enjoining you to puke.
Good grief, for fuck’s sake,
all those godawful politics…
Migraines in proliferation…
A cluster of gutted seeds…

-r. miller

The Refusal of Light

How shall we move the light
when the light refuses?

Then we move through the refusal,
bones and everything

scattered about us, skins
of songs we know by rote,

shreds of the masks
we know by heart.

We move through swiftly,
beyond the comprehension of light,

somewhere beyond the syntax of light,
where the light becomes silk

in the mouths of clouds,
chewed by the rains

contained in those mouths
and spit into our laps.

-r. miller

On the Tip of a Tongue

Just your friendly neighborhood
phantasms, awakening clockwise
ready to dance in accordance with
their inexplicable rhythms, and from
their dancing, drawing a portrait
or a landscape in accordance with
their inexplicable rhythms, a portrait
of dust, a landscape of gazes.
Dancing themselves silly, these
phantasms, to their inexplicable rhythms,
until beat by beat, breath by breath,
the rhythms stop, the phantasms drop
one by one and beat by beat,
back into the silence that sustains them.

-r. miller

Catch

The voices rise in tandem,
the voice of dark and the voice of undark,
the voice of dust and the voice of snow,
the voice of rust and of bone.

Could we catch them as they rise,
these voices? Catch them unawares
and contain them in the cage
our fingers make as they interlace?

Surely they would slip
so easily through such brittle bars,
rising and drifting as they do
in the broken blue of twilight,

their song, a distant song, a song
of memory that begs us to forget
the petty narratives, grand minutiae
whose meat no longer satisfies.