Six Poems
by D. R.
James
As recollecting wanes,
I am carving out an effigy of
Forgetfulness grasping mangled ledgers
of memory. Look how it shuffles screens, kinks
files: larceny of channeled retention
from unmuscled thresholds and honed lingo.
Its intrusions inhabit the vacuum.
It hobbles the hinge of suggestion, the
fulcrum of my textual clout. Like sleepwalk,
pillowed and impermeable, it is
ambling the clamped mansion of my cortex.
Flanked by Fallacies
Trepidation carved its corridors toward calm,
tapered-dissolved-defeat, drizzled delicious
consciousness over recalcitrant fate.
I’d been mechanical, my state diagnosed
as articulated blurs coalesced
like a burned collage that inured my mind.
I will not pretend to forget what’s forged
or petroglyphed here. Years ago, I was
flanked by those patchworks that made no sense, so
pitiless the swirls, the burls, the burdens.
My Wife Practices a Psychotherapy on Me
Using the “Dissociative Experiences Scale”
“What percent of the time, by intervals
of ten,” asks the seventh of twenty-eight
hypothetical manifestations,
“do you feel you’re standing next to yourself,
seeing yourself as another person?” Like
that masked head of the alien conjured
by galactic metaphysics as an
optical reincarnation merging
with a wobbly and thinly white-washed wall
of haphazard placards? “Eighty? Ninety?”
Not-Still Life with Columns, Balconies, and Gossamer
A shrug from the universe’s shoulders
spun over and strung onto the rungs, flung
unbuttoned, overlapped over all with
muffling like sleep, monastical, a see-
through silting and stowing of shafts, floating
veils that soon enough damp most meager lamps,
the panes and rails softened, swirled into orbs,
subsequent crescents: thinning to a film,
inhaled up into us as consciousness,
they swim the black and blue cavities white.
Once, Subdivided
Like self-exiles, I was proximal; I
was blue spot-lit, gray spot-lit, somebody’s
sector. I nudged slushy snow by nose and
froze touchingly, concealed my seclusion
like a cosseted crime. I snugged up to
angles-cum-anguish, to double-crosses,
to vessels and vassals, harnessed my gut,
my groans. In vain I trained for inclusion
at tables in gorgeous chambers of guilt,
black/red symmetrical graves. Then…scrapped it.
Unremitting Epiphany:
Shoulders and knees unyieldingly mature!
Mine slide bone over offending bone and
puff like tough balloons, fueling refusal
to move. Once, my shoulders were boulders. Once,
my knees weren’t tricky. I’d sic ‘em on lifts
that deep-sixed me, rips willed invisible.
I saw them scoring jealous stares, mistook
injury for max-burn musculature.
They saw the future, the facts that would soon
ooze, their doomed hinges undone with stickum.
