poem || Raymond Farr

Eating Tornadoes like Marcel Duchamp

I am up at all hours, breaking down boxes, setting fire to doors,
eating tornadoes like Marcel Duchamp might’ve done at some
point in his DaDa career, dipped in vinegar.


I am all over the meat aisle, saving my coupons, the fog
is a foie gras named slide me on over, I dance the umbrella,
electric slide boogaloo.

The History of Water Down through the Ages is frequently
grating, this August, iron fish scales flake like doom into believable
mythos, like the wine of 19 dovetail joints to drink myself to
death in.


I holler as I maypole (but not without reason or raison d’etre),
possessing The Enlightenment, a bevy of scourges, chases
apples out of context, the town is a cart load, I borrow the handle.


I hash mark the village, stealing some pieces of our dark bosses’
tweed, sagging with such innocence, this wickedness, this palsy
is ruining my trench coat, a vista post-abattoir.


I am book marked above all (I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man),
the watermelons undo the stitches, holding skin to bone, then
relinquish the mannequins’ gout, happy to oblige.


I never oscillate when I perambulate, I call out the tin men and go
harmony on horseback, what else is a poem if not gluttony for
lack of structure?


We are black rubber doorstops stopping in the middle, making art
that’s a face, a petunia to the heart of all that’s goodness and light,
a remedy to historicity, the wrong school of Athens, cum rollicking,
sans neon.


What text ends before laying linoleum, the madmen ask, playing
a flute, brittle wood flaking like ash as it penetrates sky, laying on
hands though.


Laying hands on a watermelon, the bay half eaten, a marmalade-bay,
or indifferent species of, we make jelly shoes out of, canceling the blaze,
turning egret table number nine over & over the waterfall’s arm chair,
refusing to stay lit, a fraction of a function of a function of itself.


Please remain plastic, the sky bulbous and hazy, a realism that won’t
surface, as if it prayed.


Existence imitates a contoured posterity, as something brown and
nomadic fits a lock named for icon, John Locke, the cucumber rind,
the tumblers all steely and waxen, a focus that’s brief.


The Harvard guy said, monkeys have keys, equivocating harmless
events named butterfly skin, with a fox hound that dreams, cutting
rock into axis, the rear view’s a mirror.


I am rolling up thyme, snot in spicy spinach sleeves, goat on the run,
entering the entrails, a butter’s worth of Palm pilot, tasty as panic,
a daisy of Marcel Duchamp arrives on a cigarette, hewn out of granite.


I was a pony, that’s Paul Éluard, the lantern-pome version, then
laughter, a shoe of the poets, like a latch with no purpose, who sits
in the rain counting his coins, one by one, a harbinger, a stanza,
called purple dynamo sneezing fit, then laughter.