The Composition Scared Stiff (from Consequences)

thetargetbird:

The Composition Scared Stiff (from Consequences)

If love is to perfect the image of life
in the stillest peach as a discourse of existence
laid bare upon its spit with flesh heavy
in marbled pain and fucking, then at least remember
to call after your date if you said you would.

I’m against making machines work as art,
the cognitive discord of things stomping
and whirling to the beat of ideas a reverberation
of history that shocks my hands as I try to break
it with a sledge. Consider taking turns

misrepresenting the details until we’ve found a new
route to contemporaneous expression; I’m so sick
of forcing down hand-fed grapes and telling you I love you
by saying exactly so — if I could smash apart

the genders of each apparati dancing from the mobile
of the heart I would, instead of mucking up the articulation.
If you find me balled up on the kitchen counter, it’s no reason
to evacuate an opinion of me that isn’t reverent —

it’s just that after all the considerations we’ve taken
into account for the future qua present, I’ve decided
I need to melt and reform a bit before
I’m ready to stand fully within your gaze.



Yup, still filling your dash with stuff from Consequences because I want to annoy you with my gratuitous self-promotion and make sure you download it. Sorrynotsorry…

A Levee-Encamped Sky

I worked out the age of weather
x-raying its fillings — no sun
to wrap my arms around is worth
the favor: shake his hand for me.
Echo, twang, squints, claps
bent as coke bottles
to be shared, the doggone dog
gone in a flustered hint.
Son, the house is full enough,
no room for arms wrapped
in a sweater or foil or heat
forever on the mind of the house
waiting another decade for summer.
Reveal, through a dozen or million shitty
poems about the rain, a sky
grinning in your face,
hearing you weep.

-C.S. Henderson

Collected, May 10

I.
The architecture, surety of intimidation,
comes hitting precisely the parts
of piano we know — between enemy and friend,
new tones must be restored to their conceptual order.

II.
How did I get here, or did you get introduced to a we?
There are no such questions but we ask them —
working by some enchantment, slapped in zen,
dunce gargoyles pose as if to question, and question.

III.
Remember, intimidation is just a question of whether
something in you can be killed — I do not want to watch that —
I break apart when we introduce a surety, which pushes
me into the pool without presenting a bathing suit.

IV.
This is fun to write:
an introduction to a decade
of days into May; consider your breath
and you’ve given words their form.

V.
The challenge, then, is to quit breathing and form
belies its insidiousness.

VI.
Them is an irony, when it should be we. As in:
we have lived in a century of clouds.

VII.
It would be better if we did not understand this;
rationally, rationality is faking it.

VIII.
I moan, making up what’s true
is true: desire has invented my mind.

-C.S. Henderson

high resolution →

582 Love Sonnets to the Rock: 12

Let’s not spend too long
with the whirlwinds of light,
or the visions behind curtain fissures,
fine corpses wound around our fingers
when all the while, really, we’re beyond the idea
of a tomb. The fog had our prints on it,
us alumni of transfiguration, rewriting
the vernacular of islands and anything
surrounded by a sea. I close my eyes and

imagine us on a spicy plain, fires bursting
through in lines drawn as a mesa -
I’ll try not to wake you, forehead resting deep against
the sky, until the stars are taut with gold
chains, dripping immensely with fruit.

-C.S. Henderson

Today Is Going To Be Ruthless

You must be born again
and again and again and shake
yourself to life — separation
is natural and unless you treat it
as a joke you might as well throw
yourself into some abyss.

That’s what I really meant to say
when I spoke about black hole irises,
a hollow look that is serious and sucks
the vitality out of all the light
bulbs in the room. But of course
I also chose to drink when I was looking
and maybe misinterpreted a stare
at a shaving nick as something severe.

-C.S. Henderson

The gods are dead — this isn’t the problem;
we know how to hold the sun in forceps
how to make hunger look like an omen
how to melt as man might like ice.
Days upended revealed the lost shoes
laces undone, holey soled, to traipse
about days’ magnificent hawkishness
in flow. Where we lose is in the snaggle
toothed ghosts unending, married
to space born from each void bursting
into place between bodies and their shells.

-C.S. Henderson