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Abraham Smith: They Paint

July 31, 2020 by PBQ Leave a Comment

themselves

with mud

and the afterlives

 

of certain pondy ass plants and

they accomplice ‘at

with a whole lot of throwing

 

stoop and pitch

stoop and pitch it

stoop pitch

 

hey what you can’t see

can feel it falling

but there again

 

you threw

it so you

are it

 

just as the pirate eyepatches

tarantulaing yr lapel

are who you’ve sometimes been

 

just as the weather

was the one

weathered the weather

 

hi-5 blind

cool killing it

oh so casual in the win

 

carrion confetti

of coleridge chris

whitley christopher smart

 

rain trellis luck marks

mud orthodontics

mist posthumous mist

 

under these and they i glaze

and praise run and runnel

stoop to stipple in

 

the art of camouflage

a kind of transference or travel

or plagiarism or side lined

 

with snowflake catpaw

with newspaper ember

with moth blow

 

yr nose

with a hamburger

napkin

 

kid killed it

so wipe it

fresh from the heart

 

all

upon

him

 

and what did he learn

from the body undone

that dead wet

 

life in it heady

heat weak wane unready

echo pre shout

 

gravy to cradle

settled to past flung

lunged under thud tender

 

a blocky punctuation

a den a dean

everywhere on the body

 

nowhere in open air

nobody i recall my self boy

uneven yard

 

that’s them dogs for you

that’s throwing a ball up

for catching it

 

that’s trickier than

you might think

that’s something to do

 

with the tragic joke

slant and slope

of self and earth

 

that’s self same thing about dog

thinks it’s all about them

my god good errant toss

my bad dog good pirate prince

my shitty spit slobbered ball

my 29 tosses til dryish again

 

my not my ceiling opens

my not my sky uncorks

my not my season tumbles

 

as carpish suckers

roiling in shallows

but how can i track you

 

if you ain’t working

on something hard

about to hollow all the gavels

 

into pipes

and the greyblue bird

you exhale speckles may well

 

bee your own scales returning

to a visionless distant unmoney down

unheld greenbrowed

 

water reopening

they’re there as it does

skirting us lonesome hihat weavers

 

ringing silence

lawless and binding

ringing it with a double u

 

all lamppost future pure

and woven of such wrack

as this as they

 

covered up in it

hunker nestward

their blood the hunter’s

 

supple

clay slow

blood

 

their ladder

snorts the checkered adder

bade the chokecherry aubade not me

 

their body the pliant cattail

the bossy bleed note redwing

sterling stopped atop bows

at the pace

of watchfulness

for the prices of love

 

for we taste of one

another won’t allow swallow

the oldest urge to hum

 

offkey amazing

grace again against

moth mouth for door

Filed Under: Issue 100, Poetry, Poetry 100 Tagged With: Abraham Smith

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