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.

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