Verse and Worse: Selected and New Poems of Steve McCaffery 1989-2009

Coleridge in Calgary (ars poetica 4)

Coleridge in Calgary (ars poetica 4) If a thing is a stone it starts to appear in this poem as a selected novel sculpture reinvents a page inhabits it but calls IT architecture by mistake the table recognizes cascades slip off grammatical pollen meat disturbs the windpipes even butterfly chauffeurs can edit poems to form a sub-invention of the alienation effect objects are unstable on computers catapult clouds form dots as a language Language never knows Selected and New Poems of Steve McCaffery 1989–2009 / 29 the meaning in the sound anarchist thrown to a separate word as some concrete information. Guess how meaning gusts down a road long dead the dodo never answers but I shall always know how poems subject the optical to a node of composed interception possibilities propagates the poem to re-arrange a historically negative order. Either One appears as Nineteen different things you hurried or else I thought desire per se was what WE were bombing 30 / Verse and Worse stones thrown up from pilaster philosophies. How large is the dawn patrol these days as eight times the average speed of the simile falls short pursued by Petrarch all the time electrocution guaranteed for Yuletide? Tautology like a like not liking it on chronic alcohol just a few little tomcats in the artery cushion. Remember blood removes that horrible smell of minimum fathers Selected and New Poems of Steve McCaffery 1989–2009 / 31 on another corner the marsupial giraffe we cloned in a toe-dance manuscript napkin meaning “modern” if “modernity” by-passes the pre-articulate at traffic stops red as a sign of ripe by semiotic flashes the hemisphere without bifocal sunburn feeling place is actually a leg. Thinks poetry knocked me out not knocked me over. Welcome Coleridge to Calgary as an exhibition text-book at third base. The rim embroils itself the point is zero zoo as art eats piece of dog grunt sixteen sumo wrestlers emerging out of tamaracks with apricots 32 / Verse and Worse a page appears to clear a throat but now please the color of smell entering a bakery but leaving by the door marked bodyweight in kilos converts it to o’clocks shifts automatic taste to violet light from candelabra guillotine. Think of park pies for a second at several inch-high graduation parties glance back at the bakery beneath the bed then “mirror” all material into view the batteries lost my ticket in a swimming pool aunty clothes my nearest dealer Stalin shot him to avoid the north-east home-belt failure clothes line swamp baths beating half a dozen chairs or shouldn’t slowing down the poem slows down one way the whale reached entropy Selected and New Poems of Steve McCaffery 1989–2009 / 33 ...