Monday, September 21, 2020

Multiloquy


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https://youtu.be/BZ7rXp_oolY

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Things devolve, reveal themselves to be extraneous

extremities, eventually obtruding obfuscating

tender slender and insensate lines that bunch up

like the spines of broken babies’ bodies thrown into

a common grave: little ones whom nobody can save;

geometric chaos waiting for a wave to sluice them

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back into the sea in which, disintegrating, they will

find escape, at last, from obloquy. Is contempt

the generating force that drives the green fuse through

the flower? Dylan Thomas didn’t promise happiness.

Who can promise that? And yet, and yet, I rise

to shave my head in public and to dye my beard

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a tawny brown and raise an arm alluringly so it can

frame my gleaming pate, somehow rendering to it

a lyric sense of biceps you would be attracted to,

if things like that attracted you. My drawings start

as sketches and then grow to wretched and unruly

size, indefensible: complex for no good reason, or none

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beyond a treason in the soul which strives to hoodwink

roaming eyes into regarding its thick overlays of colors

given texture by the random sticky use of crayons,

bleeding markers, pencils, waxy, wet, fat, thin anointed

implements of my decision to provision space with

something I can bear to see, as wise. I like them when

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they’re done. They seem to have such fun, all blundering

and wondering, caring not a whit that their multiloquy –

the quality of never being other than excessively

loquacious, never shutting up or saying anything that

matters (bodacious and capaciously rapacious are

the sorts of rhymes whose visual equivalents it traffics in)

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– more than deserves that obloquy those tender slender

and insensate lines that bunch up like the spines

of broken babies’ bodies thrown into a common grave

nobody can save. Sometimes I wish my drawings would

behave. Other times I don’t. Indeed, I must confess

I rather love it – much prefer it - when they won’t.

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