SurVision Magazine

12-Hour Spirit


I open with a freshly sacrificed dove.
Nope, a holy robin, stabbed in the chest, 
this votive the color of a rusted-up lock.
Dear Lord, I am dreadfully bored already.
No longer high on that gas. Or sagging from all
I sang, the back-lit and past-ripe I piped up,
and the lame orchestrations I mastered at Your feet
pitting crocuses against your sickly kisses.
Shit, I'm still a little tipsy from the brochures -
the suite upgrades and free rub-downs,
eloping with the new pope and his stylist.
It's no wonder I keep messing with this sentence.
These trees now referred to in the past tense.
The sun waffling, unsure of which flaws to rouse.
How I thought I was locked-in, true bluish,
my voice thrown from Your coveted mouth.
But now I'm tic-filled as I cite what life's lent me,  
start to peck at my image in the tin plate,
the former, a page of little mattering, the latter,
this ongoing game of alleging to smart.   
Yet more rain that moves like hissed venom. 
More salesmen that talk up their lameness.
Are these latest tensions sent to entertain us
or to mate with the old ones we never quite tamed?
I can't crow my allegiance or even work up a spit, 
can't respond to this figurine I've rigged up
from empty dope bags and wine bottles
with anything but the flattest of tones.
O but please, let me get our last dinner.
Take these stale rolls and rinds, the picked-over.
Even coming-to as some mock-up is a nuisance.
For aren't we defined more by what's fed on us
than what we teamed up with to deafening silence?
Ah yes, it's graceless to argue my case with the committee
but hell, ain't I the same man You'd named once
in so many words and with so little irony?
I tried not to bring in the world. Or how the damned
are mostly made of Your unmanaged dreams. 





30 Year Trial


Hey, who's in the mood to be dashed
against sadness' farthest shores
and shown up by yet more
doom, that never-ever-letting-on?
If you answered, "Yes, me!"
slammed-door loud in the mad-
interfered realm of your alternate soul
then it's just for you we've added
yet more walls and windows
to gaze at and out, feel more sinful,
dashed and over-shadowed by
winded web, a fly, half-dined-on, 
snug in your nightshirt, velvet mask,
our latest moon shined to a mail-order omen,
our woods endowed with death warrants
or men with guns, unruly warts,
who'll stuff a straw version
of your most nervous selves
for the minutest of finder's fees.
What the hell is worth lowering
from the heavens anymore, left
to worship when slammed down –
Disney-fit to this world's dimensions?
Not the sun-god your dog has undone
or the vase of your lover's ash saved
from the floor's strained invitation?
Or this wine's newest sing-a-long,
some dung afforded your doormat?
O, less I forget, the sonneteer's
studied turn towards your deaf ear,
their dusted-off melody, stammer?
All we need is all your attention
wed to "Enter," your dewy-eyed nod.





This Shut-Eyeing


I wake to more numbers
clawed into my alarm clock,
this palest imitation of what
you've come to count on as me
I can't lock-into with any surety
as if I'm slumped in a Russian cab
smelling of musk ox and lace, 
a dullness stapled like insulation
to the warmed plate of my skull
and this deepest plum sky has my back
as the driver skims over the gears then
stares down the mirror/hidden video cam
though my ears cannot agree on his age
or the age of his curses thrown God's way.
Or maybe I am only hearing a lover made
mad by two hearts or the dog from next door
being followed by a wolf in its dreams again?
What is truth to the agitated lid of the shut-eyed,
the rusted hinge to their tagged artifacts? 
Hell, even the good are not that good
and the bad, well, they fool around, dabble.
At best all of us enter what files life's lent you,
that forest you're tented, filled up too much –
an animal cowering in these veal-brown leaves,
assuming the dark wants what's lightest,
or that surf you're urged into, fussed-over –
this fish, its most sacred of scales lacking in
all but a calling, its lips froth-bit only by trophies.
Each time I sleep there's less of me to please.        





Mark DeCarteret is from New Hampshire, USA. His poems have appeared in Agni, Boston Review, and Chicago Review. His collection titled (If This Is the) New World was published by March Street Press in 2007. He was Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Poet Laureate.