Mark DuCharme
Mark DuCharme’s recent books of poetry include We, the Monstrous: Script for an Unrealizable Film (The Operating System, 2018), The Unfinished: Books I-VI (BlazeVox, 2013) and Answer (BlazeVox, 2011). Counter Fluencies 1-20 appeared as part of the print journal The Lune (2017), and other recent work is in Caliban Online, Colorado Review, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, Ethel, Human Repair Kit, New American Writing, Unlikely Stories, Word for/Word and Noon: An Anthology of Short Poems (Isobar Press, 2019). He lives in Boulder, Colorado.
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Hidden
Trundled voiceovers smote the brute
Paintball vendettas—
Too large a charge
For men in shorts, wedged into
Cut glass skies
(Accoutrements smoldering)
§
Never there was that does not mean
Bowling pin landing patterns
A cursive bricolage
If you wait before the rain the features
Will crumple like parched
Sandals in winter
Or a seizure in tinctures—
Plunking all
That random parrots
Dream
§
The eye completely terrorized
In cities of lost children
Without being spoke-\
n completely
Without being broke-/
Almost as if we weren’t
Outright when
Ghosts in partial ruin—
The unburdened night set free
§
Undead as before
Yes, in a minute
A minute we don’t own
In the heat unstill yet still
Infected by the sky’s
Night rhythms neither
Hungry nor
Revealed
§
In windows of things we know not what we
Cling to—
Bones in the throat indigo flutter
Flicked rote or wrought diamonds off
Landing patterns
In a place where the moon was put back
Intermittent whistler time-stamp sepals
A looser architecture could displace
An opening under all taut worlds
Remembrance twists with words torn off
§
You don’t know the weight of the hidden
Yearning to be seen
Yearning to tear off the page—
The ghosted & unequal
The sky is lost to private signs—
Pirate signs that energize
The few, in ghostly rain
Piracy & intimacy are not so different, you know
Ghosts, in partial
Harbors
Inflected with false tongues— the stale
Kindled bodies that night also tries to
Hide
Thousands Blink Outside
About what towns were they dead in wonder
Waiting for fresh neon to survive
Awake as before, Conquistador
Or someone else, who calls me Bubbles
In the next scene, there’s a rare feeling
Thousands blink outside
Don’t go away
Develop laughing pneumonia
Only hashtags fail
When evening slurs
The root square, or
All instructions for our breath & cure
Birth’s scrim, uneven vinyl—
Unknown shudders, vanished strides
Almost Not Like Pages Full of Night
I. (after JML)
Almost light, but triggered
In the event lush timing
Already not light, but a harbinger
Of some days or useless night
Uselessness we already paid for
Inventing the smoke & the rope of light pouring
From our shallow cares, which are not bright
Are dark, in fact, though we invent
Stages full of light
II.
Light, this earth to be delivered
The child will bring no joy (I wish
I hadn’t
Said that)
Light ripples over
Us—
Plumelight impacted, of night’s dark thinking
The dark in the play of the letters of
Your name—
Bright crystal tears—
The earth burns, & all we fear
Are the cares we profess in autumn’s brittle-
ness
C L
l e
o a
a f
k -
c
o r
f u
s
l t
i e
g d
h
t
Attentive to the things of life & earth
That everything revolves around, & we
In light, the color of
Plum-stippled incre-
ments,
Proceed—
III.
The page we stained of broken phones
Lips pulped with leaves’ colors
Longing for birth in the arms of the trees
Is nothing the sun hasn’t already seen
The stun of the glare in the evening’s breath
Is open if you hadn’t flown
Away late in amber as mouths’ dark colors
As sun to the flesh flush with night flush with night
IV.
Innate cave joy
In compline expositions
To see them there to see them
Gadding
Awake to the cave of the book that remains
In brute song leans into
Allure
Yet even the complicit cricket
Gleans it
A jaded two-fer
Plunk balcony addled rumors
Amid the grace to start a case
Lean factions
Plunk seasons ivy liens
A dram of care is all that’s there
However fast this brittle life runs through it
Up (or out of) El Shiraz
In the note at the end of a rumor
Rote punk schooners
Band name alchemy daylight fissure keeper
Somehow it’s red
As a pronto Mercurio
Daisychain chained alto scooter
In the proof of the truth that you missed it
Artaud told you
Not to squint
Blent night ink bucket
Night rumble allure
Archy as in what might burn
The page torn with bees
Engine rot, engine rot
Lipstick
Level, when alone with auburn
Timing
Lips a sodden glossary
Frightening elk rhythms
Blue mantis ilk thyme
Jolly polo
The rail isn’t set yet
The rail isn’t set
Whose ilk? Cruise later
Angled hair almost grossly
Lava romance animal channel
Another charade
Regret normal
Lapel crozier suitcase
Lave witness validation rerock claims
Like the diamonds in her thighs
Rend a cow, rend a cow (suitcase)
Rent windward leg anthems
Subjective checkered wicker vinyl mirage
Mirage plaid bad tanning
Your taste for the bland
Is not so grand
Remember the rest of us
(The rust of cyan birds
Instilled like swaying
Trees—
Mark DuCharme’s recent books of poetry include We, the Monstrous: Script for an Unrealizable Film (The Operating System, 2018), The Unfinished: Books I-VI (BlazeVox, 2013) and Answer (BlazeVox, 2011). Counter Fluencies 1-20 appeared as part of the print journal The Lune (2017), and other recent work is in Caliban Online, Colorado Review, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, Ethel, Human Repair Kit, New American Writing, Unlikely Stories, Word for/Word and Noon: An Anthology of Short Poems (Isobar Press, 2019). He lives in Boulder, Colorado.