Popsicle Aquifer
Wipe the saliva off the sky.
My forehead desires it.
I am sweating in a coffin
Sweet as a lyre.
This decadent polyester balloon candy
Entices me.
Automatic sugar,
Diabetes moonbeam
Slash eulogy seduces me,
Slipping off like stockings
Silky as an ear drum
Beating itself alone
To pulp in a seashell.
I will find my demise
In a basket of grapes,
Plums, pears & bananas.
Prepare the marmalade.
Men, I am here,
Distended as fruit cake,
Peanut butter.
- Quinten Collier
(featured in the poetry forum 07.19.11)
Quintens
I
Here is the dawn: a pearl, gauze and gingham.
She can never stay long; incandescence
Drapes the Mesa in platinum vapor,
Transient as a gown of lily tongues:
All things young thrive in love for an instant.
II
The light of the room
where you first awoke: the light of the room
that wakes all first things:
the noxious mirage of cartoon colors
threading moment to
moment; idiot elves and princesses
infiltrating our
"living" room where part of what wakes still sleeps,
as the day, outside,
uncloaks each atom to it's origin,
we rehearse the mute
crystal, mute yet still babbling, blaring
(Is the day painting
on the flowers’ shawls? How real is her light?)
a mindless trumpet
for all the other geese- violet, pink,
electrode azure,
pathetic mauve and cold, screen-vacant green-
to join in chorus,
permeating Now with the less-than-here.
I apologize,
but Cohen, Nicolai, and Boots I see
no other way out,
for every door in this house leads either
to lunacy or
The Desert, itself just a physical
manifestation
of The Universe's mental illness
(Perfect Sadhana?)
seeming more often locusts than honey,
till the rain strings us
with your stars, Leo and Aquarius,
Capricorn's necklace
of milk the web that entwines our fortunes-
I must remember
this, read the artificial generic
as a joke with eyes
anagogic: all is changeless, a soul
cannot be tainted
or cleansed; all is passing: a soul is healed
or hurt already,
so where, Na, Scrumptious, do we lay the blame?
Karma? DNA?
Cartoons? The dawn reveals that each atom
has no origin,
is neither here nor there (are those bruises
or chocolate palm
prints crossing your ribs like wolf or squirrel
tracks until your heart?).
This Valley is an inverted mesa.
III
Yawn: orange diaphanous: dusk-etched cloud-sighs.
IV
Close
your eyes:
a
curtain of
fingerprints.
V
A part of me
Apart from me;
dreaming your own
ciphers, nested
against my ribs,
despite how I
contort myself,
bed and futon
support only
one acrobat
a night
(Yes, I
am well
aware
that this
is what
the next
twenty
years will
comprise).
- Quinten Collier
(featured in the poetry forum 06.04.11)
Postpartum Postmortem (Graduation Day)
My name is Prayer Bead.
I have taken the gold baton
from my foster mother's navel
once more intending to snap the champion's tape
with my belly button.
I forgive you.
Kiss my class ring.
I have a gift for your cholesterol
(the 401K decathlon victor
offers a bikini frontal lobotomy
for your shadow):
Make addiction scrub the table after supper,
wash the car windows at the gas station
and bathe the dogs.
You have holidays to accrue
and doctors to usurp
through casual chess games.
In every can of body cream
A dozen Nefertiti's wait to go to work.
Looks mean nothing
but you must look better than all
or lose your eyes and wrists.
In every tube of spermicide
a night of drinking will occur,
not so much the inverse.
Take heed if you value your life
and fear breast milk.
A forest is a city waiting to erect:
Learn this before you tan your loin cloth.
Water fondles all it touches.
Be like water in a business suit
or lacrosse shorts.
- Quinten Collier
(featured in the poetry forum 09.30.10)
Letter of Sedition
Do not forgive me for the circumstances of my personality.
for the prodigious murmurs of my delirium.
for my illusions and illuminations.
Do not forgive me for those I've raped with my hands
nor those I've saved with my tongue,
nor those I've murdered in my mind,
nor those I've revived.
Do not forgive me for the forests I've laid to waste so our dreams
could flourish.
for worshipping the stars with the blood of a new born.
for torturing the oracle in her temple.
for walking blind into the ovens.
for inaugurating the moth as our queen.
for seeking refuge in her chrysalis.
Do not forgive me for being born again.
Do not forgive me, for I am a lover of things increate and annihilated,
the edifice of phantoms, the ghosts of the living,
monuments of rain, blue palaces of memory and air,
photographs printed on sand.
Do not forgive me, for I am the warden of the beasts as I am their slave.
Do not forgive me, for I am only as guilty as I am pure.
Do not forgive me, for I have studied your sacraments and I have prostrated
myself with the weathered youths of your poverty.
Do not forgive me, for I seek not the skeleton key to unlock the heavens.
Do not forgive me, for we are all aligned under the constellations of human
mythology and there we are all the same.
Do not forgive me, for I have endured your forgiveness before and I have
bowed to your psychologists and philosophers.
Do not forgive me, for my corruption is the only voice of my innocence.
- Quinten Collier
(featured in the poetry forum 06.01.10)
Sugar
Sugar is so sweet.
He He chooses Sugar
But Sugar will not have her;
Sugar doesn’t like
Fat little children with dimples.
Sugar is so sweet.
Oooth.
Hungry comes to eat.
SupperTime likes Hungry
But ate all the tongues and teeth
For to chew the meat.
SupperTime runs out all in shame.
SupperTime likes Hungry.
Mmmer.
SlimHer picks a mouth.
SlimHer likes Big-Lipped This
But goes with That One Sowed Shut.
They’ll soon be good friends
After Dinner steals their children.
SlimHer goes with That One Sowed Shut.
Uuuzs.
NumbMumble gets born
To be nothing certain
But certain to be nothing:
A certain Nothing,
Fed and sleepy and farting then,
A certain Nothing.
Nnnal.
Taste has Here Before.
Taste is mannered in Then
But gendered and pregnant with
Proceeding and Next.
Taste stays still and hates it’s naked
Proceeding and Next.
Iiiwb.
- Quinten Collier
(featured in the poetry forum 05.22.10)
Quinten Collier!
Franz Kafka was this chick I used to date-
humorless, opaque, malnourished, clingy,
systematically jealous to boot,
she always forgot to flush the toilet
and made ham sandwiches that tasted like sand,
complaining all day about her mother.
Her skin was like varnished pink Saran wrap.
She had a down home insignificance about her
and was always getting misplaced or lost,
locked in port-a-johns at White Snake concerts,
shoved down flights of stairs by novice nurse maids,
diddled by college professors and feather weight pimps-
I think that about sums up our first date.
The sex change didn’t shock me all that much.
-some souls just get put into the wrong body-
but when she told me the name she’d picked out,
I admit, I laughed in her face.
QUINTEN COLLIER!
Sounds like a new age salami
or a fashionable fish-
Why not Jane Austen or Sappho or
Edna St. Vincent Millay?
Something bespeaking dignity and finesse,
not a name that conjures images of scummy restaurant sinks
or crippled miners!
QUINTEN COLLIER!
QUINTEN COLLIER!
She (he) won’t last a day with a name like that...
- Quinten Collier
(added 05.22.10)
Barges
Shipyard is the director of this program-
Her doughnut is getting cold.
She tells the lights to shut up
then caresses the espionage
& mutual aid button.
I wouldn’t ask her for a raise just yet,
better wait
till the tendons thaw
& the contestants have all been
electrocuted.
Cue camera 2.
- Quinten Collier
(added 05.22.10)
Austin
There can be only one first time
(though there have been many)-
after subjecting ourselves to the mandatory hours of lust,
once, only once,
after observing the introductions
& enduring the formalities of beasts,
will our bellies be filled with this certain excitement:
a thrill that dapples our sexes
with the beginnings of rain,
binds us with wonder & mystery & origin,
every sense trembling with vision,
raving, erupting,
then taming into the first sucking of lips,
the first nibbling of necks,
the first pawing of breasts.
the first goosebumps on the arms and spine.
Only once will we forgive like this,
with an erogenous pull
that annihilates all the flaws of our endlessly decomposing
bowels, that divulges all secret intentions and morphs
the sterility of guilt imposed upon us
into the vulgar and magnanimous thrall
of exquisite knowing and flesh-hood.
Only once will the stringencies fall like this
as we pummel each other
and caress ourselves, burning flowers with our gasps
& smoldering cloth with our flooding contortions,
the earth-supple gyrations of our dance,
the electricity that pierces the ribs,
forming iron darkness to our pelvises
& entangling the seams of our eyes with silver-thorned vines
nubile, mildewed from the elemental heaving shade &
dampness of our groins,
we uncreate shape at it’s birth
to reforge the ancestral angles in mute, teeming, crushing thrusts,
we try to obliterate the other into us,
for we’ve forgotten what is impossible
then everything is still.
Warm frost spreads through you like liquified butter in spasms
soft orange light flickers running through your finger tips
your thoughts melt like mercury then
it’s over,
& once again you’ve failed.
There are no second chances.
You’ve seen her belly like rotten wood
& her unmatched breasts
& she’s seen the boils on your back
& knows you can’t cum.
Now you both must flee to the rites of other first times
or engage in the ritual of love.
Quinten Collier
(featured in the poetry forum 03.02.10)
Haiku
Why are we fighting?
This desert’s big enough for
us all to die in.
It takes desire and
sacrifice to become a
grand masturbator.
All knowing Buddha
laughs as you drink from the cup
he just now pissed in.
So tell me again:
was it your words or my ears
that were stuttering?
They smile and laugh,
start the burlesque; optimists
love a funeral.
An exposé on
door to door mattress salesmen
with nowhere to sleep.
I broke a grass stem
then with four sturdy knots I
demanded it mend.
When Earth’s had her fill
she will exile all her dead
back to their fathers.
The mausoleum’s
shadow, embedded in mist,
has nothing to say.
Now close my account;
I was born a beggar, it’s
time I lived like one.
- Quinten Collier
(featured in the poetry forum 01.16.10) |
