PROLOGUE + POEM = PROEM

 

A first poem that introduces a variety of your themes has been dubbed a proem. Here is mine for my next book: Irregular Splendors

 

POET ON THE HALF-SHELL: CRAZY SALAD

 

 

If I could just let go of Jung’s dream of holocaust on a train & I can, I’d walk right out of Poet’s House, up Chambers Street to the A line — in a light rain with a backpack full of Battery Park lyrics, in the spring, insouciant, in full sunlight, decipherable: inciting action, rising, orgasm, falling, you know the score & no it’s not just another bullshit day in suck city. Married to all my maybes. Fini.  Discarding scripts, chanting Blessed, Blessed, sweeter than haiku, Wordsworth, hibiscus or work ethics.  Yes, no more sharp elbows, a coupling of Matisse & baby toes or Home Depot for some women are strange feeders.  Let go. Ignore crossfire. Walk off the page, leave stage. Launch coup d’ etat, light candles, for God is no fugue or prose poem, no stained-glass story, only glory, in air, in awe, for God is a verb & so am I.  Inciting action. O wonders inexhaustible. Enlightened. Hyper-spiritual, grace at ease, as my voice stops trying to name me. In the budding spring, in this temple, in the now & now gone, more plum than prune. Romantic, conventional, kinda cheesy. Eternal. Bounced like a vagabond’s fantasy – this urge to pass through & never to own, in media res. In love. Sexed. Buzzed electric. Salty. Undefined yet explicit.  Rogue, free & holy skeptic. One hot mess. Spun halfway to Venus, this rapture tumbles like an iambic brogue, falling from honied tongues,  immaculate in its astonished conceptions & light frenzies, flown beyond all meaning  in its  high arc, in its riffs of aria & elegy, pulsed beyond the last blossoms of our always irregular splendors.

 

 

 

 

HOW TO SELECT YOUR PROEM