Issue 4: Mitch Corber
Yawning Songbirds
Veiled moon over Vaporous Valley
a myth of impeccable depth
Hasty cookies cornstarch
alarming inventories of sordid crave
Imagine the explosive hose
a yawning lawn of
early dawning songbirds
looking for a clearing
Indoors I shun a one-way weekend binge
for the twinge of meditation
Creaky cabinets of look-and-ye-shall
plainly chase an acquired taste
Catching cod in a leaky canoe
Tossing odd tributes to liquid Neptune
Easy lifeboat throat of
sporadic nibbling
Curvatures, reticular
in their particular pose
throw a rosy glow
on social mores
Geiger counter passes over
the patient’s prone body.
Cobalt sky
possesses culpability
I hustle a Monday summit
up a seasonable mountainside,
tipping my hand to the landfill
scorched by an ill-timed torch
Fiddler’s Song
An errant gesture snookered in that drinkable
prayer sheer myrrh the drowse and woozy eyes
of fried colic receding a fleeting tooth in tender
loincloth moth-eaten thistles pursed lips
bewitched a thin whistle twitting free
Each will work a turned ear tweaked by
unimpeachable promise the long sighs
shy in the pocket of locked and guarded goods
holding fast till the last laugh traffics back
a scratchy flutter in the clutter of commitment
You’re first to swerve off the railing roped
to an old hope a happy lapse a feathered
whether-or-not clot in the throat tendered
when the base blend of lyric & tune assumes
the Fiddler’s Song gnawing in the dawning
A Hundred Tongues
A hundred tongues lead me to steer
the impossible far-gone conclusions of a sleuth
chewing on a clue. In turning an inner ear
to the serious nature of plates,
I break one, to see what it’s made of.
A fluffy pink arousal is a cotton-candy dancer.
A mordant everlasting is a faster buck untendered.
Zones moan a stasis, rot-got-yer-tongue.
Tumultuous minutes of a popular clock
sold in most Ma & Pa hardware operations.
The feeble and the senile in a circle.
A terrible sucking attenuation.
I’ve watched my insomnia breed a block
of theaters, wished my restless fiber
to wrestle with the gods.
So I’ve softened expectations lately,
a scale hovering on a number. Fumbling,
I’ve fastened “laughed at” to my magic strap.
A hinge of shyest flavors infiltrates
a zoo of higher learning.
Heavens erupt to the sumptuous past.
Museums are leaning to historicize.
Slinky tiger catlicks his claws
hogging all the best kill.
Teeth seem straighter when they smile.
Awardee of the New York Foundation for the Arts and producer of Poetry Thin Air Cable Show, Mitch Corber has read throughout NYC. He founded the Thin Air Video Poetry DVD Archives which include Ginsberg, Corso, Ashbery, Di Prima, and Cage. He's appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Nedge, Mirage and tight.
Copyright © 2010 by Mitch Corber, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
