Poetry

 

 

George Moore

Expatriate Press

The words are individual syllables
scrambled by the heat of the sentence,
which condemns the meaning
before it has had time to ripen on its tree.

But the natural symbol is dead, or read that
read, as if backward, into materials.
The Yeatsian dream gone sour,
fruit of the ideal.

New voices digital representations
of what it means to represent,
or sayings slayings. The pond becomes
the city sewer, gray pavements wink.

Now we take out our slide rules,
our hypochondriac counterweighted
bedwetters, the aftermath
of what we may shortly become.

On the streets, the press releases
gaseous sentences into the rarified air.
The people wander aimlessly to work,
on a tight schedule.

Look at the way we slam into things,
they say, the way we stir the wrong
pot, find insects in our brains,
to pass the time away.

From here, the world looks insane.
It is a perspective I have bought
with blood, invisible, thinning
like the letters on the clouds.

 

The New Lyric

There is something alive in the trees,
but they are not trees, but windows in the city,
where the doves coo and fuss over their own reflections.

But they are not windows exactly, but screens,
where the doves coo and fuss over their own reflections,
and beat their wings against the world.

And the doves are speaking in the language of no language,
and beat their wings against the world,
for the world believes only what it can see and hear,

and the city becomes it's grand illusion. Pigeons are doves
for the world believes only what it can see and hear,
and these birds are metaphors for nothing but words.

And the words beat themselves against the tree
(and these birds are metaphors for nothing but words),
for the tree is glass and the city a screen,

where the poet strings lines for the clothes of others,
and the birds steal these echoes of the human form
for their nests, for the gathering of new words.

And the new lyric rises against the dirt of the city,
shreds the clothes on the idiot's line, set them flying,
and the birds steal these echoes of the human form.

 

 

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