Mark DuCharme
from Defacement
Mark DuCharme is the author of five print volumes of poetry, most recently The Unfinished: Books I-VI (BlazeVOX, 2013), in addition to several chapbooks. The Found Titles Project was published electronically in 2009 by Ahadada. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Big Bridge, Bombay Gin, Eccolinguistics, New American Writing, OR and elsewhere.
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from Defacement
Defacement 1
To have slept with anyone who is not dying
To have slept with the wind in your pillow
To have
I am not erasing creatures in the norm of showtunes &
Creosote snapdragons in dead rivers pulsing
Riverine curvature in all the deadcursivetongues
Language is a river. It takes you where you
Go want it or not
& Wanton, teaches
No regrets regression, or retrograde alloys
It seizes what it does not reach
It reaches no closure, but exhausts its own
Stream
It is immanent domain, a grasp or a staying
Still
As thought, which is
Not thought (embodied)
Having become embedded
& Being, then, erased—
Defacement 2
We are not done with colors leaking
Down buildings’
Sides, & we
Are impertinent as stars at dusk,
As biotic caveats to anything we could
Randomly redeemIf we aren’t irredeemable ourselvesIf no one’sWatching us
If your breath is paper
If poems
Are merely ideas, depending
On agreed-upon
Conventions,
Then what is money?
Reverberant sliding?
The sides of grim ‘nourishment’ out of which ‘everything’ else flows?
Everything, but what’s
Necessary, thus is
Necessarily spilled—
for Amiri, not Ezra
Defacement 3
‘Visible light’ dreams night, negotiation
Everything is music, if you listen
Everything light, until you see
What’s visible
Everything is troubled in its features
Its creatures, its impacted harmonies
Its trebled impact, leaking after dark
Daylight is what
Most needs us
If you need something, describe it
While pretending to be Charles Olson
If you are Charles Olson, then you are dead
If you are dead, stop reading
If you aren’t, continue until breath
Catches in night’s machines
Defacement 4
Facing, as against the light—
Or touching
Whatever midnight
Fails to bring
‘Light’ &‘midnight’ are easy metaphors
We wish to complicate
Crushing metaphors is an occult project—
A de-naming
Or framing still
In other light
When you come upon a project
You have to accept
Its terms, but also
Must create
Your own
[Wait several minutes, while readers create them]
[Stutter, then applaud]
If you are a reader, stutter, then resist all conditions
If you aren’t, go back
To the book of displacements
Mark DuCharme is the author of five print volumes of poetry, most recently The Unfinished: Books I-VI (BlazeVOX, 2013), in addition to several chapbooks. The Found Titles Project was published electronically in 2009 by Ahadada. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Big Bridge, Bombay Gin, Eccolinguistics, New American Writing, OR and elsewhere.