Raymond Farr


Open like a Heart to Metaphor

1.
A painting
Is banal

If a yellow boat
Says

A bad piano
Plays Baroquely

Things badly
We speak only

Notes
Open like a heart

To metaphor
Depicted

In tones
As strange as

The genius
Of nothing happening

Of interlocking
Figures

Spending
Time


2.
To prepare
Himself

For death
A man in withdrawal

Sits in a heap
Bent over his opium bowl

He knows that life
Is a portrait of emptiness

& dreaming of beautiful
Introverts

Something
Is roused in him—

Ordinary people
At a border

Representing
A narrative




A Stain of a Remark
                                                                                           Untitled (No. 122)
                                                                                          By Cindy Sherman

1.
She is shielding
Her expression

From the lens
Inside the lens

Where time is
An eyelash frozen

Against her cheek
& she’s forgotten

Herself—
A stain of a remark

Wiped from her face
It is a blunt

Not a groovy box
Of chocolates face

It is redacted
All except

For an eye
Some things

Are better told
Fists clenched


2.
She isn’t that woman!
She is unbreakable!

She roams the paneled rooms
Where she lives

In the box in her mind
She is thinking her brain is AT&T

A strange music that shimmies up walls
& then just abandons her

All black sand & pink clouds
The ghoulish candy-thoughts of a girl

Holding a gold knife to the throat of the sky
But no one calls home

The distance is not near, he told her once
Putting on lipstick

He was scary
She moves thru fiber optic cables now

Like a signal
Infrared to ultraviolet

She is one with the hell
Of light speed

It is fast loving!
It is bitter travel!



A Late Boat Arriving

The dogs asleep
In the grey coffin

Of their cynicism
Seem sometimes

Our scarce cousins
Sometimes

A double meaning
Leaning forward

Flanked by bowls
Of silver Hershey’s kisses

Their grief’s a palimpsest
Of Baroque thoughts

A knuckle of remorse
As red light climbs

The garden wall
Their rapt survival

Reconciles
A late boat arriving

& the phone
Not ringing




Raymond Farr: Ecstatic/.of facts (Otoliths 2011), Rien Ici (Blue & Yellow Dog 2010), & Writing What For? across the Mourning Sky (Blue & Yellow Dog 2012). His poems appear in Otoliths, Upstairs at Duroc, Cricket Online Review, & Eratio. His latest book Poetry in the Age of Zero Grav is due out in late 2014. http://blueyellowdog.weebly.com
 
 
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