Raymond Farr

The Little Men of Biographies

Sesame Street & the olive branch
& the mobile library coming into plain view now

The French say love is like garlic in yr hair
That the blue eyes of our contagion have wiped away eons

But we vote our piety here & not our consciences
& love is a man ruled by the sun & not the itch in his bones

Even this sad yellow paint has seven shades of itself
It calls them the little men of biographies

One of which is a banjo hiding in the forest
The others are sacred mules taken out of Mexico at night—

A gently sloped & shaded place
& only sleep when thunder stops just short of deafening us all

Or it’s like “Whatever!” says my niece
& whatever is what you least believe to be the truth—

Original light batting the trees wildly
A figure of speech croaking like Bly in the river

& stuck him on a tar-&-feather boat out of here, says the poet!
Is this glass or sod we’re looking through?

& Like a Flower We Are Hopeful

As a luminous gold fish
On the cusp of luminous identity theft

We are the one-sided argument
Keeping all things to ourselves/the sky, yes

Someone calls ego a clock & moves on with his life
We weep for him like a wave continuously

The sublime the ironic like a 5 o’clock shadow
Know only the lunacy of red balloons popping while we sleep

But the sky whistles like a stevedore
& the 60 pseudo orchids we paint by number

What are they but the antonym of beauty?
The white hot glass of a poem hardening in

The eyes of sweet funny Elizabeth?
Her face wheeling around in this big car

Of the person we’ve become
Lost in the sun of too many cars

Raymond Farr is author of Ecstatic/.of facts (Otoliths 2011), & Writing What For? across the Mourning Sky (Blue & Yellow Dog 2012), Poetry in the Age of Zero Grav (Blue & Yellow Dog 2015) and 2 e-chapbooks, Eating the Word NOISE! (White Knuckle Chaps 2015), & A Journey of Haphazard Miles (ALT POETICS 2016). Raymond is editor of Blue & Yellow Dog, now archived at http://blueyellowdog.weebly.com & publisher/editor of a new poetry blog The Helios Mss at theheliosmss.blogspot.com.
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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.