This is a collection of poems I wrote in a similar style. The tone is dark and the setting is fantastical. They read like twisted rants from another world.
I’m calling these pieces “poems” rather than “poetic prose” because I feel like it. The creator defines the art.
My decision to abandon traditional verse forms was an aesthetic one—I don’t have any creative use for line breaks or specific verse meter. I believe the educated reader can naturally sense a rhythmic structure, just as a person knows whether a smile is authentic. Obviously, this approach represents a radical rethinking of versification, which has certainly never been experimented with before and will undoubtedly revolutionize the art form of poetry and the study of prosody.
When I write, I try to use an economy of language. To this end, I use words that pack a great deal of meaning; words like “art”, “hate”, and “mother.” Actually, that is one of my poems in it’s entirely and an example of the way I cutout the filler and get to the heart of a concept. Here’s another: “design, love, father.” I also have a poem where I put those two back-to-back—I call this piece “duality.” I’m thinking about featuring the poems below in a musical production involving spoken word over progressive ambient arrangements. It would be a concept album as all the poems are about life in some way.
Sometimes people call my work pretentious, but I assure them that my poems are far too important to me to be pretentious about. However, I will often call my own work pretentious, simply because doing so is the only fail-proof method of ensuring that my work is not, in fact, pretentious. Pretension presupposes a certain lack of self-awareness, so in demonstrating insight into my own pretentiousness, I render the condition of pretentiousness impossible (it’s a bit like how claiming you’re crazy signifies you’re sane because insane people don’t know they’re insane).
The world is probably not ready for any of this. But fuck it, here it is.
Untitled 1
There is nothing sunken here. Just a freedom that fizzles out when you name it, like a death drive. I see it pushing through the grommets in my boots. What a vigorous patch it is. What a lossless elegiac. Not even the psychopomp’s vague supplications could make me sigh now. No bop on the soft-spot could void the disfluency. The gentrification of nothing-hood is upon me and all I smell is the spider. These are the misgivings of my Lucifer-green pumpkin cloaked in 120 pounds of bees. I exist in abundance. Wonder at me.
Untitled 2
Great, another honey badger named Hal wants his dollar back. And these mountains don’t even have eyes. Weird. Cows don’t have feelings either; that’s why they call them cows. I’ll make sure the ants skirt your sugary grave, you just make sure those ducks don’t get cropped off. And for love’s sake, toads are out this year. A fucking raccoon looking up at a dog in a tree while I’m barking at it. This is my beluga whale’s soul melting. The abstraction of hot dog prophesies: a symbol of a dish cleaning itself, the greatest thing ever. I just wish you were anything but a panda right now.
Untitled 3 / A Bump in Her Night
“Something inside of me’s bumping,” I told her. “And it’s not what you hid in my mustard bottle.” I was so close to splitting, but this was her night. The stab and the rip are married now and this union is my god. The poppy is a fair-weather friend, all coughing and apologetic. Up and away you silly colors, you stupid shapes. The bricks are falling back into place and soon this room will exist again. Time will be my bitch again. I will laugh at my stumps as I learn to fight for scraps without teeth or claws. I will bear the moment of my soul’s breaking and collect my tears to show her. She will be so strong after this. She will hate me more now that I am useless. I will show her how much less I can be.
Untitled 4: Without a Title
I think it’s funny that you’re wet right now. I don’t even know what to think about that. It is not part of my logic. I believe that the devil lives in each of us and the only way to be free is to suck his skinless buffalo knuckle. There is no biz like whoring-out your infant niece in a crack den. At least that’s what the dolls say. If I pass you in the street, I will lay into your soft parts with my corkscrew mockery. Take out those earbuds, sugarclit, ‘cause I am like the leaves.
Untitled 5 / ? & #
You can’t begin to ebb my thirst for your supplications. I was above the birthing room when you spread your petals for forgiveness. Your tar-tears were my whispered privilege. The gutters of the world flow for your thoughtless suction and I won’t sit back and seep through the pinholes of another dog’s design. The grime of your movements accumulates on me just as the soot on your dick betrays your chimney-sweeping lover.
This Poem Has No Title
This is not about remembering. Posterity is a fool’s flame. I do not wish to freeze my pain in this ice that floats and sticks. Only gruel compels me. My musk is my shelter. The weather I churn breaks beards and snaps hides. I am sparking. Soon I will be the spark of your snuffed wit. Your lanterns are bouncing towards you now. Tell me, did my eyes illuminate the page you died to absorb? This is your victory. The weights and pulleys of you have never done as much to shake these trees and drive this snow. Your stories are mine now.
Untitled 7 / This Poem is Too Important for a Title
Thank god my ego’s frenulum turtlenecks my grimace. That joke has been hosting barnacles since its maiden voyage and still you parade her ad infinitum. This is not a moment shared. You laugh alone and at trite things. The world’s ugliness is mainlined through the sphincters of my eyes and squeezed through your inexplicable facial expressions. Don’t be shy my creature. That was so very clever of you. I will disperse so little fragrance and you will think me blooming. When you look away, I am shut to you. My eyes are white to you. A child could see it. But you are the great mole-man. I only hope your thirsty paranoias etch me in a more honest light–arms crossed, frowning at the smallness of all that you are.
Untitled 8 / This Poem is Not Important Enough for a Title
There’s no sport in kicking things to you. I am orange and green and blue and rainbows ask me where I jewelry shop. There are several different schools of thought, but yours is most amusing. If you aren’t kneeling, you’re intruding. These rules are not for shrugging off. These are tastes you don’t deserve to taste. Complexity is your disgrace. Honor is your open vein. Trenches DUG for funny names. It’s easy to be interesting. Random acts of kindness and casual sexism’s the recipe. What a way to unearth a rock, and for such a noble purpose. Bring your hood about head so I can see the shadows of your foolish thoughts. Yes. You’re everyone’s sweater. Say it? You’re everyone’s dead friend.
The Engine of My Nub
By the engine of my nub, I will transgress you. I have no sharks about doing so. I have pilfered the meat of my forefather’s wisdom and I am snaked either way. I look at this horned space and the crystals of my virtue shift in favor of obfuscation. When my face turns to a thousand tiny globes and I smile through the spheres of my teeth and bubble in the corners and between the scales–only then can I shrink to my hole’s content. Hosing off the eggs for the well-wishers and smelling their stale hopes is not my favorite vanity–I am one for the insides of shells. People are mad at you now. People are sleeping to your prayers and visioning your quartering. The thieves are debating which pocket might bear the fruit of their soulless dive. There is fat between your organs and it festers for us.
Weird Hummings and Other
There are weird hummings behind your eyes. I can feel the strangeness of your words crash against my preconceptions. I don’t see the point of rattling my jaw without the whites of my fears catching fire. I don’t see the point in not being stunned. There is glitter behind your glands and underneath its microscopic stingers is a redness that is felt in the center of your head. I can’t find your wilting selves inside the parallax of Christmas lights and raindrops. The crescents on my nails taste like the pulp of quantum oats. I disappear in a child’s hopes and ejaculate from her fears. There is no tusk I have not scaled. No mushroom I have not transcended. I click sideways and out. My threat is the thinning of steel extending from the perforation’s edge. I braved the malts and the dens. I lost shoes to falls and to teeth and to truth. You cannot scream for anything. Try it.
The Poem Previously Known as Yours Again
It reminds me of salivation and the color orange. It blinds my almond shaped fact-checker. It sweetens my fuselage inappropriately. Are you trying to be unintentionally funny? “Through the apse and into the signage,” I always say. Fishing for the profile of my squat. My words are waters from the blisters on my tongue, spilling and sticking to each other in small ways. The swishing of your palms corrodes my freshness. The wasps never crackle like the first time you change your password. I see the logic forming as diadems on your brow–the puddle at your feet is the theory of your fucked condition. This fabric is interlaced with the ingredients of manhood–slide it betwixt your spindles and break until you are yours again.
nateworthy 