PHENOMENOLOGY

Fast poetry promotes shallow breathing
            - Peter Riley

I

awkward as the way he
holds his book
his apparition
in the dark beyond

I was startled
by the sound of his

voice trails mark the dim
night, mere scratches
on the appearance of

red lights
individuated, numerable
in rejection
of the horizontal
blend into one near
straight line
pointing directly

anxiety, love
& all those personal affects

I is the self
a body dreamed
impertinent
as a pebble

recessive golem
recusant ape

II

inconsequential
markers
of a seamless
faith seem
less than
some windblown
particles particularly
among these casually
strewn stones
mono
liths
in an upland
escape
definition &
consequence

behind carious
shutters angles
in offkey
curious
against
lurid sky
light gutter
pipes & rust
stain drape
stucco coming
unstuck

petrified anguish, ossified
decay
what
torment had
the mason artisan
in mind
greened
with lichen, roots
of airborne
herb in precarious
hold at point
of bird-
passed nutrient, a howl
but no
emetic capacity

III

failures of registration
within the temporal smear
perception turns imperceptibly
to memory
the unreliable archive
between clairvoyance
& reconstruction

a subjective sequence
of events, degraded
narrative
in phenomenal space
all deviations
are corruptions of the text

take pause for breath
between the skeins of content
weft of conscience
thread of argumentative
response
a felt of dust
builds up against
the needle

all the little sparkplug epiphanies
tugged out
held up
from your tongue
this is the life
but you don't mean
whatever you say

a shallow narrative
promotes fast breathing
the illusion of
pleasure
her red hair
falling
across her face

IV

bread & politics
junk food of a tired nation
loosely defined
by thought, culture, the gods

they do not worship
but respect
the shapes of their windows
the way they write

their names
in the dust of panes
take tea in glasses
perched upon stools of rare design

barely comprehensible to us who
pass through other tunnels, lives
bled out in other
highways & on ledges
of high-rise cities called Despair
or mere Convention

stamped in the fabric
of the very thing I need
or duly wish for
the words made in China
in a language that is not Chinese

V

in which things
explain
each other
not themselves

these hands are those
of  my elder sister
younger
mirror shows
my brother
much as he was

don't look away

it is
as if
but not

only of the
thing which

don't look
away

a cup of coffee a landscape
swirled in mist
it makes you think

about this
there's nothing
you can do

so this is how
the puzzle is
solved - you must
choose
where you put your line

VI

junks & sampans on
an oversaturated sea
temples with tassles
tv in the back room
speaks another language
a prayer perhaps
coercion of god

they'll take the words
right out of your mouth
& use them against you

fact & fiction mingle, blood
seeping through the pages

Copyright © Aidan Semmens, 2009