brachistochrone

“A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets” --Hart Crane

then nix toxic theist
cages in Eos
whilst you level not
deduct nothing
& barely acknowledge the rain

these ghosts are the only soil
sleep’s dark & silent cat
Paradise
burned to the ground
little enough loath to doss
Paradise
has gone to the deuce
now is Ragnarok greened
Paradise
burned to the ground
this particular house
this particular family’s mementos
irretrievable
a photo
dog, ball, swimming pool
one August afternoon
the shock of this partition door
as it breaks the dawn silence
over
& over
Izdubaryonic glyph
Uqbar farouche
jibibubonica
you will go to the Moon
do not pass Go
the scanners who know
nothing but what their handheld says
of books or of reading

disambiguated silence

crawled up out of a dark pit
fine tuning my routine
the car waiting years
for a new paint job
carnatic Grewgious
words gradually
plight plot twist
antelucan dictionary
might be rain might be
house without windows dreaming
to glue the mirror back
lattice folded inly
hidden arabesque
shifting to present tense
& back
like light along a knife blade
tilted
the pop of new comments arriving
fiestaware bowl
set into fiesta bowl clack
debride stripped bare
gates of Tuva
(the monster’s being fettered
in large & small ways
& hardly ever kills
the monster’s being fettered
by forwarding facebook memes
you can relax now
the monster’s being fettered
in large & small ways
immerse myself
in what there is to do)
fire crawl with me
sharpened expiry
glimpses of abracadabra
& groans from overhead
reptilian princess
black crocodile tears

they probably fit a diff’rent pair
perfectly
cross of kryptonite
cross of kryptonite
perfectly

"You could make the case that Iain M Banks’s Culture novels are literary SF, that Sarah Waters has written literary historical thrillers, that Joseph Kanon or John le Carré write literary spy novels, that the metafictional quality of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a literary quality, and so on."