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a journal of literature & art

10-A Net

A Net to Catch the Sun and Senate

Tell me what cannot be said with a straight face?

……………………..Whatever can be put in a straitjacket.

 

What about the trees unlocking ordinary leaves?

……………………..Ordinary leaves.

 

What about the handsome little heart that’s full of arrows and about to bleed?

……………………..A hart full of eros.

 

Music is the death of

sound, it marries death

and hopes enlisted by

the mating call’s apologist.

 

I’ve never seen a truth that didn’t die

and resurrect a thousand times

a minute in a thousand different forms

in one unvarying, atomic mind or amethyst.

 

Bugs splattered on my windshield like

a torrent of romantic notions

born for disillusionment; dark

matter’s head upon a flat apologist.

 

The blazing hedonistic palm

tree calls the sky a pot of gold,

becomes a pugilistic lamp;

the youngest thought predates

the dirt, like the anesthetist.

 

The smartest thing I ever did was touch a thing I love.

……………………..Or torch a thing you love?

 

So many things have lived and

died, and love replied. Resist

resides in love and is the

suicide of death’s medallion.

 

But now the dead are scared

to live, the dead we cast

in plays, caesarean-sectioned

from Elysium or a madeleine.

 

So dust is man’s first

thought and the rain’s

last word, and yet

the opposite of life

is fur and a medallion:

 

The feral, final will

and testament; a safety in

the alabaster (pig-eyed)

beauty of utility, or

“futility” in a remade line.

 

Your maudlin eyes are pregnant with delight.

……………………..Grief is the light

 

of loss, the ghost of

laughter, saboteur of

all religion. (Tears of

quickening no more.)

It feels true, but no

scientist can prove

when ants look down

from airplanes people

look like gods. And so

the seven naves of Venus

 

(Planets are not the

butcher’s!) open to the

mullet’s tumult like a

bodice cup. The chirping

critic and constructive

cricket leaven the Levant

 

so ducks eat our ideas and

rain can eat insanity again.

One color died before the rain

could learn its story, now

it lives above the spectrum

like eleven’s navel.

 

America is where I live;

this country is the oldest

dream until it’s born.

(The welders north of heat

cold-fuse the lewd into a

paradise out west.) The Earth 

is now the unacknowledged

outlaw of the universe, but

the second best bed is a

second apart from Venus

and her severed veins.

Jack Sheff

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