Carlos Lara

excerpt from SEVERAL NIGHT

 

You must have a mind full of dollhouse miracles, it means nothing I know of, I providence hazards & if the sky rays, what of beauty, what of Baudelaire.

These are just a few lines from my fathers, I have convinced myself that it wouldn’t hurt to say here we are & to allow myself to breathe & see.

Confessing silver & gold, I go for the most obvious always & fuck subtlety, like oak of oak, so what, & all of your minotauresque art is fake.

To have an idea of what could not is passion for me, am not gone, am lying old myself by the sun-finger in this life to live, to swap with the dark & the frank, looking into books of asymmetry, sorcery, remembering her loveliness with apparent chipmunks.

Lines, & lines like the heroin of lover, thunder bullying whatever dark virus says the poet, of course the second such luxury of held presence, in outer people without being people to hold, for night is letters from hell.

& the books, today we wandered, & at least carelessly, & there were signals within a junky proportion, a without-theater & without the girl-wine.

The rainbow-woven & the parakeet of death & the mental car & the dear freezing night meat of my blood, are you not an over-occurrence of fact, are you not the same as a chocolate thing.

The worn outward aspiration, wives unwinding a glimmer week, forgoing trauma markets, distinctly showering frantically the messianic hoodlums of you, I said the records smoke in slow-wristed time.

She has red paintings that sway also, like snakes of lunar distress, & him, his diamond month, did you hear the accrual, trustworthy ludic potential possibly, the coronal dream archer with five o’clocks, with both hands whip-drawn, as I tamper with sentimental assets.

There is no more art, only dental work to be done.

This is terrible, writing little virginity of chaos, & the mind posits, & precious stones in public, & that was enough.

Either way my shadow wears shoes, & numinous projectile clouds frequenting Luxembourg without idealess truant sample corners.

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Willing refraction & apparency, the light in your bandana, the trees, & sexual rediscovery of desertion, there is not a single sun that does not hear its passage & ignores a text, as one cannot unwrite the word wendigo.

These offerings right here seep into you, escape the mundaneness of real theater, the least likely of revolutions, when islands of maturity were going to be good, were going to be good, at least years pass.

Then she lets a genre of her shining hands in, in my understanding of morning coffee, & a wholeness feeling like one swan, the young woman is seen by another, not a poet but a lover of poets & their love object, let in by her own beauty in a fever of doings, continuing to imbibe actual visual fields, the fields writhing in actual time & place, the memory of seizure of site for its fervent formations, the situational lies turning into these several days, & awakenings ask me if they are stunned.

I should be allowed around negatives of night, to torture the ground, half-man, half-constellation, fame a miniscule point of leisure, & I love that I will find death in its oblong sunshroud, may very well dive from your memories if they signify essential flash, that I could leave you now, turn the light feel, & sleep like the broken arm of fame.

Become again the system of lightning glass change, making night fluctuate, minimalism of no line breaks, there is no red, no wheel, but the sound of them produce a showless audience of glowering, ones & twos, a thematic of unlust, not our equal.

Day wears a blue rose face behind the face-woman walking down abstruse streets of day, unfolding the structure every time your eye does, if there is no eye & you are not there.

All the way holding my chest but was hateful, open your eyes, the celibate room, the caramel sphere of self is precious immigration, working-class imaginations tending to pronounce.

The temple of easy misogyny, as ego embarks from the auras, callers of acclaim want want too much to receive the same.

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Truly a yearning of sympathetic repair, asexual bond, without-obsession of name, impossible introduction

Or affective angelic, data relieving future writers from putting on a face, allowing them a looseness of number is animal

Without the bread of familiar eyes this could, you call the ozone a coroner of beauty, I call it used up & rife width.

Ossified in weather is one Atlantis, or hunger could debate about, you love too much, or I don’t know what else to say, & my death you assume is, as anything would have justified conscience by now, I am repeating myself.

Notice the small parties overtly pretending an absolute abomination of theater, shadow, speech & its combine, with the years to come, a sort of kitchen with, & all the while firearms too, but you are you meaning locked in grey express, formed & wet with lulls of surety.

Weird sirens, & there is an outside worth mortifying, forward fades like hair is just explosive moons, the evidence mutations like music looping the dream archer of dreams, then went nowhere.

This is hardly inverse Olmec, breakable, to these words only leaning in the trash of keeping lexical.

Function-machines notice us, having so much more to do, & ready for whatever’s next play, & what is the dream if it does not involve consumption, self in the habit of self, tradition as only what the dead see, natal pause.

The gorgeous bloodcloaks in the bloodface, knowing the sentence-season of force & chance, to merge with corpses for three or four destinations.

The silence reoccurs & goes beyond the woman you is & is not, with you lives & breaths are the double eye of incurable forwards, similar to this monologue of another destroyer, but the head’s demeanor, shaper, the remainder, lover, there you go again, there you go & not without a train.

No one calls me in the obscure weapon of the future, no one loves her but I did.

Artist’s Statement

This is an excerpt from a book-length poem called Several Night. The finished work is the product of deep audition: hearing many different words and sounds, both personal and public, emanating from a variety of atmospheres, both personal and public, and allowing the phonemes to mutate, hybridize, disintegrate, etc. The title conveys a sense of struggle between unity and multiplicity that I believe is at the core of the poet’s art i.e. “making it all cohere.”

Carlos Lara is no longer a poet because writing poetry is too easy. His work, including translations, have appeared in Lana Turner, Aufgabe, Gulf Coast, Paul Revere’s Horse, etc. etc. etc. He once co-wrote a book with Will Alexander called The Audiographic as Data, the manuscript of which is sitting in Google Docs waiting to be published by someone somewhere. He manages to survive in the city of New York, possibly the most boring place on the planet, where he is often seen driving from one BBQ joint to another with Michael Keenan. He’s currently translating two books by Rene Crevel and putting together his 10th unpublished manuscript. He is also collaborating with Keenan on an unproducible screenplay called Return to Alchemia, featuring cameos by Roberto Bolaño, James Joyce, Bullet, and the Chipotle at Union Square, along with many others.
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About Posit Editor

Susan Lewis (susanlewis.net) is the Editor-in-chief and founder of Posit (positjournal.com) and the author of ten books and chapbooks, including Zoom (winner of the Washington Prize), Heisenberg's Salon, This Visit, and State of the Union. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies such as Walkers in the City (Rain Taxi), They Said (Black Lawrence Press), and Resist Much, Obey Little (Dispatches/Spuyten Duyvil), as well as in journals such as Agni, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions online, Diode, Interim, New American Writing, and VOLT.