This ladder must lead somewhere. Half an hour ago, I was sworn to uphold whatever it is left me feeling so vigilantly afloat in the doorframe. You can’t buy the farm when its wholesale regret loads this location game down to the tiny icon of the boy I’ve been. Being’s all about lateness now that everything’s been conquered. Who wouldn’t reach into history to chisel an antiquated likeness of the face that mirror’s assembled. The store and back takes a conductor willing to overlook self-inflation. I can’t whip myself anyhow, a tarantula in hand at the science museum’s about as daring an afternoon as I’m broken by, culling my dirt animal from a sagging mattress. There’s a moon ‘round the frame of this rickety fortitude. Figure I’ll get to punch out any moment, taking the first rung with me.
Ed Ruscha Scripts the Last Saxon a Monologue
Hey Space Ace, noise won’t smash a radio, twist through more damn traffic a little of this historical dust, a little of that rodeo jelly, so why tune in the toxic broadcast when it’s keychain music revs up disgust avenue the speed lines around this cartoon volume crackup? If there’s some rust on our chain of events, a lame theme’s backdrop to adventure, then gimme that warm auditorium gate pass. I’m gasping for contact. Year after year, the future ruining everything. Here I was at last, spent royal, upset babycakes, another Hollywood dream bubble popped. This heart attack business is major surgery for the adios music of a surgical ash opera. Honey, I today am severely clear. Mind if I fuel a crying shame with the gauze it takes to turn body English into gush stuff: three sweets and me in the middle, cleanly hooked. Did anybody say “dreamboat”? Indeed I do wash, then dance. Well, fairly small torpedoes buzz a romantic move. I’m amazed, respect the great age of blank stardust. Pressure stains miniature nightmares. It’s curtains for the fragility zone.
Geppetto Also Made a Mother
There is nothing imaginary about a piece of wood.
It has its life, like you or I, and returns to the ocean.
Gravity won’t allow the wheel to roll up a hill.
Having no imagination, a piece of wood doesn’t care
if it becomes a fan blade, a coffee table, or a little wheel
on a wooden horse. Real marionettes have no strings.
Real horses, arriving at a hill, may or may not climb it.
This has nothing to do with freewill, an invention
of purely academic interest.
The Chinese invented stirrups, and their hills
have been covered with horses ever since.
On a clear day, the ocean goes on forever.
Like Oedipus alone on a hilltop, this is a literary device
used to demonstrate the value of beachfront property.
Italian literature has never had room for gravity.
Like you or I, it has its life, returning always to the ocean.
It doesn’t care if it becomes something to cover a coffee table.
Strings pull real wooden horses. This is an example
of the imposition of freewill on inanimate objects.
There is nothing imaginary about the historic
importance of the stirrup’s role. On a clear day,
it is possible to see wooden storks clouding the air.
Noah Eli Gordon's most recent books are A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow and Inbox. Novel Pictorial Noise (selected by John Ashbery for the 2006 National Poetry Series) will be out in September, and Figures for a Darkroom Voice, a collaborative book (with poet Joshua Marie Wilkinson and artist Noah Saterstrom), will be out in October. He writes a chapbook review column for Rain Taxi and teaches at the University of Colorado at Denver.