Adam Strauss
AUDIO
Faux Ekphrastic
The hands are blue; the paint is grainy; the mark of
Conjunction misleads; the mark conjoins the to
The; the canvas is bare in spots; barley grains
Speckle the lower left corner
In which a clot of bloody snot
Lives out its retirement; the grains
Are imagined as an architecture; the
Grains are restored to their field
In which there is no felt so cheer is far
From fleeting; the fling in the foreground
Is actually a dainty thought gone feral and flashed
Out in opalescent greens moon-monsters munch
Like algae off of coral heads; the sea which
Used to lap where this room’s been erected
And suddenly it’s as if time’s been disconnected
From space and the present is a no-place
Where one can look and look and see
Possibility realize the major means
Afforded these odds and ends endlessly
Unimaginative cognitions argue are no
Start-spots for telling this here world what
This world here need hear each day and on a good
Day every second quells this quelling; the title
Of the canvas implies no ocean and the curling
Strokes which aren’t the hands at the center
Of this image in the midst of its imagining
Are not blue nor are they red though an R
And E and S and A seem to sneak
In a red sea; this fact is where gray and pink merge;
The merger is not the whole one can look at
Walking this gallery in which one courses like blood
Through veins those very vectors of one’s course.
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Syntax
1
At the switch there’s this titular torque, there’s
This, there’s itch and
Ignoble orchids, arid reticules
Whose hoopla is histrionic, but this should
Come as no
Surprise when
Hegemony is the ubiquitous
Mode therefore—modality be damned—drop
Off the face of
Here and—hurray—you may see their cute eyes.
2
Ailanthus
Extricates itself from
Foibles, fops and
Fiduciary clemencies so, therefore, one
Might assume
There’s a lovely little
Elephant in the room
When it’s closer to
The truth to say one’s recently left
A dump which leaves one scratching a pudendum.
3
At this, outside all
Dispute, there’s a little
Pile of curls
I believe
Would make a fine
Wig for a pig
But creatures which
Shit more than a certain quota a day
Are illegal
Therefore this ain’t gonna fly.
Closer than4
Carbides to a thermometer, I snuggled
With a snaggletooth—the tenth
Anniversary of
His teething—and this is
As exact as fact but fuller, fleshier:
Mitochondrial glitter pitched
To the most minor chords, corroborating
Voice as a calculus, a talus
Steps slip like applying lipstick in a subway.
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Web
Spidery wisps whip out a superfly spectacle: lethal filament
Strands itself at
Transparencies in which occlusions stage themselves.
The start
Of another
Beginning:
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Poem After/For Johannes Göransson
With deer there are derisions.
Every time it rains hard enough the ferns bleed.
Every time it’s hard deer jump across ravines.
Blood warmth wilts the ferns.
Scarlet floods from wildlife crisp the tendrils.
Out of the body the crisping blood begets legs sans saddle.
A shivering human manages a mount.
Tongue to hallucinated hornrut a deer-filled gut hears yarrow sprout.
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With Deer Poem
My psychobabble is not worth the wisdom of Margaret Drabble.
My psychobabbler looks best in the gold light of entablature.
With Deer my My makes scrumptious bites local bitterns have gone blah to.
I am in possession of me; my me is currently Margaret Drabble’s.
A bittern shits on a page whose font’s named.
My psychology fetishizes fonts feeling out the feeling they’re a fount.
My isn’t me; it’s its exact opposition; the place I is stated divides I.
With Deer kenosis erupts into a positive—blood a bath starving souls nourish at.
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Fragment Transit
I said to the parrot you are going to die
The parrot it was green seemed to be
Listening or at-least the mustard-yellow
Feathers downing its neck now bent
Into a fruit whose smell is gross but
Immensely nutritious so who am I
To complain when at a distance this sight
Surpasses anything nearer in its ability
For delighting me who is no immortality
::::::::::::::::::::::
Well you see—there’s a storm.
Trout huddle.
Across versus down never makes all cases.
Rut after rut of redaction.
The girl with green nose-hairs.
The salon which dyes them dying to use her as their FACE.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::
He doesn’t like sunglasses on anyone unless they’re
Super-sexy in a sporty way—like someone who can play
A mega game of tennis or launch off a cliff; why then is
This guy guiding a livewire from one failure to another
Starting to look like the start of my latest crush? Lamblike
He eyes a gal walking by beneath; and I in my sense don’t fret
Again losing out on a chance to flirt due to heterosexual hegemony.
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Roots—Rings
1
Going—gone
Ontology logging off
Lucifer-logos oh I love
You and you and you—ya’ll
But is this love
Enough—every second is
That question never fully
Answers; is this failure?
Switchback track through timothy
Trembles me trailing
Myself further in
To a ring risks exclusion
But the reigning
Message is this tracks
Reality not celebrating delusion.
2
Roots
Sustain me
Rooted to dimity
Convictions
One grain one grain one grain—a sand
Shifts revealing
Past from which our present
Reeling radically romances
Ringing fingers in
Filaments
