An Unwearable Tendency Or Likeless To A Form
not a single author on this linoleum, mildewed and warped and polymer pulled
not in the novel jettisoned across hypertext fiction, not if even its id is minced
nor a page or sapphic fragment or photonic quantum catching light like cut rock
not this now, not another reminder of which odic outlet is nearest, new convenience
not this name as contrapuntal or blunt-nosed or dispirited or brisk or crisp or lustre
~
none of the diaphanous dystopia scored over dissolving paper, twiction unwrapping
or rustle walks into bathhouses hand-in-hand as if to follow through her style guide
none here, none there, no one to issue a turgid queue, bare jigsaw feet straining
no runnel wide enough or deep enough to translate this purling conscious refusal
for the no show of silence as more than nothing where less is so much less material
than less is more as if something supra-evolutionary mandated a nodding yes
yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes to the inaugural line of an emergent haibun, glyptic
~
still crippled in its notice to percolate beyond the page, perform, chew the cud
incoming, revolving, soft-shoed smiles as if rail metal would clang too heavy
too weighty a gravitas into a sinkhole so yawning, it bursts in on itself, uppercut
to shift left of right of the piano, fingers run along black edges and angular mass
to render a couplet after the trip to tonlé sap to know there’s no surface crossing
~
without the torrents that build, swell, shiver, rivet, raise, forge today’s crash pad
forehead in the sink of an egg chair to eat teeming names, and crinkle the syllables
An Interaction Hypothesis
Somewhere in Palestine, a double wheel has punted both flywheel and wheelhead, bereft too of its vertical shaft. All that’s left is a bent posture straining against the Third Dakini who has her levigation tanks very dapper, duck row on a cleat escalator. Dakinis have that obsession with veering as if deflection helped the restitution of a primality – these entropies too were housed in pallid juglets. “Buzzard lovers who mesh themselves like gold pages into cypress,” Levi Maban quips with self-possession, his old harshness now disinherited. “Home and the suburban mundane. A calming nostalgia and memory. The quarried coast as cool to the touch.” He has remained in modish municipals the last three years and three months, three more days to go before the oil lamps get their luscious ovoid and short nozzles. The Fourth Dakini has drawn out to full length, and scraped a fine picture of a Cluniac monastery on all of them. Maban is formal witness to such dakini residency, game of chance within widgets: “This bricklayer owns her distinctive mark like the sky walker. Each new cut another vision of her wood chisel and club hammer.”
A Desert Inquisition
Ballad of Bachmeier’s Greenbrier. It’s singing itself out, and the dakinis seem grim, implacable when they raise their forefingers in a chorus. They can be a unified menace, in a drunken band, what with Chinese porcelain made for the Spanish colonists not so long ago. The Fourth Dakini likes the cool of the pistol-handled urns placed in the Fitzhugh washing bowl raspberry-red as the eyespots on the nearby butterfly. The nearby butterfly is freely swinging, looks like someone’s soul in a cytoplasmic spray. “Do you think Liuling will like Idaho? Do you think he’ll know how to ask for heating when he needs it? What will he do with his backyard of black-eyed Susans? Does he know of the laundromat with the free healthzines, the one with the deep pots of wave petunia out in its driveway?”
Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé has two new chapbooks, Dear Physical Environment and To Whose Mandolin It May Concern. Trained in book publishing at Stanford, with a Master of Theology degree in World Religions from Harvard and Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Notre Dame, Desmond has edited more than ten books and co-produced three audio books, several pro-bono for non-profit organizations. He is a recipient of the Tom Howard High Distinction Award, Tupelo Press Poetry Project Honorable Mention, Hiew Siew Nam Academic Award, and Singapore Internationale Grant. Desmond also works in clay; his commemorative pieces are housed in museums and private collections in India, the Netherlands, the UK and the US.