dan raphael
Other places with current dan raphael poems are Blackbox Manifold, Rasputin, Gobbet, Curly Mind and Caliban. He hosts 2 monthly reading series in Portland (OR, US), is the prose editor for UnlikelyStories Mark V, and writes a news poem every Wednesday for KBOO.fm. His most recent book is Everyone in This Movie Gets Paid from Last Word Press.
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People Walking Every Surface as if the World Escher Lived in take the boat out of the water, fill your pockets with tomorrow, gently place an unknown village between two slices of bread you’d never made before, baked with loud music like the 2 hours of dance necessary for fermentation sunshine comes whether we’re ready or not give us this day a few wondrous moments, as i run my fingers through my hair more fingers appear like a fan becoming a hat that started as a blade, as overnight the land-kelp make the streets too slippery for driving but perfect for stoned sports, asphalt mouths compressing our invectives into a puck dense enough to fall through the earth close the screen, wash a plate, spend 20 minutes exhaling, teleport the rain needs pruning, the refrigerator must be transcribed, small enough to come out of a trapdoor carved through a book i’m quickly to regular height, so grateful i grow extra arms and a smile that can be seen by satellites: tourists open their guidebooks but cant find me, my lips in constant motion at a frequency the mosquitoes transmit free of my house i’m soon off the charts: antarctica before the ice, manhattan underwater, tomorrows time-nibbled mirror-clouds orbiting worlds not yet congealed i can ask for water or a bathroom in 37 languages. i don’t sit until natives do and usually cant their way. when everyone is left handed so am i. never levitate with strangers leave in the morning As the street breathes a river is never the same width, micro pulsations, trees pulling from the ground and putting back air in the water in the dirt, softening & hardening, blossoms without light blossoms reflecting other blossoms, not territorial but horizon widening as i’m on both sides of the street at once, as i’m lining the sidewalks as if waiting for a parade, flotillas stuck down side streets,the wild unpaved loose as a stick, when given the option go straight & parallel my presbyopia makes the sun a constellation of fire, like glass roofed houses seen from above, house on its own island, island on a multi-jointed mechanical arm sweeping the border tween day and night, tween direct and shadow the street breathes, puling me to both edges, unclogging my airway the street coughs to evict me, to remove my footprints climbing out of its lung that’s the sky, busy with alveolic clouds, soft turnstiles and slow propellers, one spin a week, shadow light shadow light dappling micro-switches, coin-flipping turbines more wing less body, bird sharks inhaling the nuggets of meat without form, sugar without a crystal to consult, fence unraveled til i'm cloaked in it, a moving fence, leaheless, have no permit to be higher, to interrupt the migrations beneath the streets scalp, as you slit the tops of bread before baking so those who want to get out can, exhale rain and inhale sweat, i’m much too young to help the street, too short-lived to hear more than a sentence Close By, in Another State shadows on the white car—paint trees caramel rambling like a 3 inch river inside a pulsing city arm resolute stubborn articulate worming to experience the anodyne of sleep when dreams arent in focus I want the mirror to forgot those faces behind me singing atonally as if only I lyric apostle, bent to blend from prison to church. a self-generating ballot box why water toom muscles, when we wondered how we could live among all the trees & not be run into by nightly commuters, those who only see when asleep, only move when distracted by plaster and temperature zones where veri turn the moons behind me, the winds from my left /// house surrounded by taller buildings, no windows in my direction, If you come to my door i'm in the phone lines, syncopating electricity to turn the wheel away from cars trying to merge with the largest dogs and cats who’d bounce before they surrendered, want to get my teeth around the pain of light, that doorway in my throat, so much noise but no one comes through 18 wheeled thunder split by 10 pins vibrating at their own embroidery seen in light through a massive colander colder than itself drawing the heat of our hairs into visionary prairies we’re now small enough to coast that perspective like a coded roll of internal textures unwinding into a rain of white-out darkening in any pore mistaken for oxygen, take a steak thick brain slice and dare that labyrinth, if whats taken out still remembers whats between it, an amber rambler with one last exhalation about to //// I breathe in a world map, van gogh’s starry night, aerial photographs of interplanetary cities when air dies, when the ax gets a new handle the message the photon was carrying gets dropped in the dark happy man in a new woman’s bed we dance palm to palm, eye to eye, the occasional swivel away to follow the wandering musicians, as jeans become wide-bottomed skirts, a chandelier hung with faux stars, mini-reactors breaking apart the idle rumors and day old trivia that usually piles in the corners, discreet & odorless //// houses don’t grow, streets don’t bleed time going backwards, entropy blossoming throughout the body’s terrains, growing & softening on the outside, more space within & between, I hold a monitor to the lumps of a soup I’ll become never say never, having 7 fingers but only controlling 5 at a time I bought a third kidney but couldn’t afford new pipes I wont let the rain that falls here leave To Be Self-Evident I hear but can’t see you a crowd of aroma, crown of evaporating flame as if sown around the world of genes one little twist grows a million iterations to, through, sewn inside my lips my hips, radar dish, the pelvis tracking Who you calling for no such name/ number/ warrant wrenched or slit, hammered or screwed loose as light, right as rain that isn’t all water ><><><>< Not against the grain but enhancing it, consisting it so you can’t tell one from the other and every bite’s satisfying cause you knew what it would taste like before you peeled off the wrapper risking my breath, driving through the tunnels of my bones Only one of my hairs is an antenna, no length, no wave from sign to signal to order: the strike could be a stroke, a fit induced by what no one can hear into the teeth of meat, electrified platinum floss i could chew for a year and never digest it all, worn away like travel in a vacuum, fine grit rays across millions of miles, each breath a mile, each soul a star collapsing to advance, advancing to feed i hunger for a tomorrow with no more threats, no less opportunity ><><><>< How you gonna churn through a thousand foot tsunami of information when all the data toilets flush in unison, when satellites decompress all they contain and swaddle the earth in self-generating layers of cell phone and internet chatter, my teeth don’t know what to say but feel their enamel melting like wax 2 feet from a blow torch, the vast nets our sun welds every day When i can’t turn off the faucet, the tv, when the phone’s inside you you can’t not answer, 3 nights in a row i've been interrogated in my dreams in languages i don’t recognize. ><><><>< My car has many voices in the chips, deep fried or baked so pure we can’t call it water anymore, or silicon coated with one billionth of the blood to wrest it from the earth fried with 10,000 clarifying volts The satellite no longer shows my house, my neighbor’s yard doubled to fill that space i'm no longer in my yearbook, my driving record says i'm suspended between public transit and micro-holography What’s taking me the next step to gone doesn’t knock or call, doesn’t need a window
Other places with current dan raphael poems are Blackbox Manifold, Rasputin, Gobbet, Curly Mind and Caliban. He hosts 2 monthly reading series in Portland (OR, US), is the prose editor for UnlikelyStories Mark V, and writes a news poem every Wednesday for KBOO.fm. His most recent book is Everyone in This Movie Gets Paid from Last Word Press.
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