Issue 10: Robert Mueller
How Do You
I’m pretty sure that languageness
is frugal and all amiss.
I haven’t the taste for rutabaga
but deep in my endless craving
for warmward inner glowing
I snivel into appetite fresh
from the soupy gavel to the gristle,
freshly to bend the lurid homing swizzle.
Spiraling down the pathways
presents enigmas for landing softly
on white clover, as if traps sprung
urge the instant run;
but I haven’t the patience,
I get lost in the stations,
it takes a grand prospect
to provide me a pilot,
a persistent licking, evasive, corrosive,
and it keeps on picking from pot,
the things, whoa, they mass in polyglot.
I am sure that the emptiness
gathers drumming of persistence
for you and for me, now,
miles from the harbor
safe with its tree-lined
abundance, safe from false barter
and hunger, screaming the lands down
the wool keeps getting hotter.
Sleep, o sleep, how these recesses
will give us freedom in playground,
in the park where the runners are charting
missives from souls to souls, from earth-wings;
and so how do you like them artifacts?
How do you cypher dice from jacks?
This Poem Bruits it about its Diorama of Skin so Watch
And therefore I am
a better salesman ferociously
among the dots
strewn discretely among the lots.
I say I am
but seek thyself the garbage bin.
Seek harbinger
of what kind of state
we’re all in.
Cranky the seat
but it will do
when I’m through with you.
I said I am
I again
and I cleaned and jerked it.
Be naked youth learning
or be fountain’s yearning
or be skin to skin.
As On a Shirtsleeved Lip
The flicks were empty
the pokeys were stymied
grebe or swan creamed the surface
glass in a bristle-stick
Lime-pewtered ferrets
freaked at the frozen
mock-up of lurching
Sounds ultra-cool upon
the brink of mangrove
unsummarily tickled
with joy having a has-been
Sounds entered now school
shapes of fish-woolly arena
clappers dimple centralia
stroked in a murk the frazzled hen
Sounds great sounds allnighter
ply it with Hund-Steigers
chipping at roots and girders
mushed mossy turmoiled and moiked
Star-stripped dragonflies
were subjects of combing
the groupers were moaning in oily
slimmer rigmarole as on a slip
schmiered out as on a slime as on
a shirtsleeved lip ol’ shudderly purling
Glimmer and grip
grin teeth of the gloaming
scattering delicate
shrink-net whipped
Robert Mueller has previously contributed a poem to Issue 5 of Blackbox Manifold and a review essay to Issue 6. Recent essays, often experimental, may be found in Spinozablue and A Gathering of the Tribes. His poetry appears at these sites and in Moria, Sugar Mule, Ink Node and American Letters & Commentary and elsewhere. A 2013 chapbook, We’ll Have Poems After, offers delights in poems and color cards.
