Featured Poet
( Texas )
Blanker (cut) Blanker than THAT (cut) Blank like the expression on that one girl's face, you remember, wetsuit; (cut) everything shoved under the jumpseat (cut) or was it a bucketseat (cut) or a backseat (cut) or was it a blank seat? (cut) You remember saying "No one ever died standing up or running at full speed." (cut) But they did and they do and they will and they continue (cut) and if you ask a nun (cut) and if you ask a nun they never met a single knuckle (cut) and if you ask a murderer they'll say they never (cut) His face was blanker than a banker when you tuck him in a wallet (cut) Blanker (cut) Blanker than his mouth when he said "You'll know more when you get there or if you grow up" he said "Now there's not a pet or a darling or a thrush or a thunderclap." (cut) Not a butcher or his paper or the space under his feet (cut) where Blank is not a word but it is everyone's profession, (cut) where Dogs are not allowed or a husband or his shoes with their guts knotted up. (cut) But is this all a velvet rope? (cut) Or is this just the burning match? (cut) Or is this poem the nylon cord I tied around her hand, (cut) or the neck of the fork of the road where she (cut) or is this just an echo of the night you cut your toe and left your mark on the beach (cut) when your bloody toe marked the sand (cut) and the movie of that day takes a long time to start (cut) and the movie of that day ends on a dark chord (cut) and my name is marked across the final cut.
At the time of the creation of this poem I'd been reading two books: Dickinson, the Thomas Johnson collection of her "Complete Poems", and that much misunderstood poem by Langston Hughes, "Dreams". I know these two pursuits seem academic (or in the case of the Hughes poem, laughable) but I found in much of what I was reading the weighty hum of repetition and the drone of sound I'd admired for years at work in church music. I found that often the power of the hymn is in the slight change in tone, therefore repetition broken in terms of MUSIC, as well as turn of phrase, where we see repetition manifest in LANGUAGE. This poem came out of a long writing session . . . a free-write turned on its ear . . . this poem is pure fiction, born from a daydream. I'd seen, like in a vision, a man sitting at an open window writing pages of a screenplay and tossing them out the window as he finished. A screenplay that one could never shoot. An endless length of blank pages at his side.