Stu Watson

Kleptomaniac Thomas Hardy Wedding

Ypsilanti, Michigan suburb awash in ruined doors | combined apparatuses for drinking out coal tar | lung switched grey residents out with the flogged door | trick turned on a short corner wallowing besides the small ground | drumming underneath of a discontent that channeled makes the pavement | made the door, an individual never thinks it’s his | her labor alienated in amicable patriot’s cove America | Descartes’ uncertain cribbage | there’s a monkey’s gland mixed into Yeats. | Fraternal knot dry heaved out from an earth torn shake blown madrigal piping un-tourniqueted wound | wind streams, larval flaws piping hot pupa flows run off the crass horse gutted fast by wolves left dashed and bashed askance for smaller wings to pluck | we dryads in a glutted wood of luck | full migrants for the tapestries we draw | unbound wind wound earth saw | skit diamond blade shrank straight lane clutch | in trances splashed with runes and such | raiding marks as carve out best the score | and slam the shore | again again with churning beat | set to unseat | freaks bled lexical indexed dead | though likely printed, seen but never read | unwanted résumé | bobs in an unadulterated way | clenched gutter spittle-lick | crack lineated colors wick | the pages over lets that sharp cut | ululate | but | straight | away rush into inmost day | via spiral staircase, say | “It is here I will tumble down you all” | and spiritedly make your fall | performing shame before technology | lay at the altar of Farfrae | ceding the title as the law demands | accepting alms but no laying of hands | evaporated unwanted in the cruel | compressing machinery that, as a rule | cares not for you, the individual | plinthing you into a particle | of gear here near the surface. Full | fool. | Staring directly down at yourself in effigy | floating by on a river of glee | flowing freely from a guilting mob | gilting water with painted dummies to fob | off talismanic like a door | an outside that leads inside nothing more | another compartment settled and arranged | a press a grid a form a block unchanged | except by governmental shifts of grip | marked fingerprints that slip | onto a digital slide | you cannot hide | so separate that part of you that’s tried | to keep up dignity; dignity died | and went to heaven which, when spied | looks exactly like the past; I lied | the future; timeless darkness either side | of that brief bouncing bit of light wave dancing | while atoms in themselves can keep advancing | with stability | before electrons lose their viability | and gravity too dies | or other planes move in disguise | and skewer us out past | the shallow buzzing of our being here at last.

Stu Watson is a writer, musician, and artist living in Brooklyn. A founder and editor of Prelude, he teaches literature at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
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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.