Sunday, November 16, 2014

4 poems || Philip Byron Oakes

Stuttered Cues

Mired eloquence inflating balloons with vagaries
as to the weight of words. Anxious polkas dotting
a dance schematic, luring fat feet to the floor for
falling under the spell of the oompah. The
chutzpah of a pause to breathe in a breach,
drowning dissent in the swim of heads to shore.
Spawning an utterance out of turn to sow as
necessary to learning ambivalence. Grand as the
piano left at home. Contortions the accordion
prods to prominence. An airy doggerel of culprits
taking comfort from a loan of oxygen, in a phrase
ringing in the ears for gallant overtones. Warming
up a face for subterfuge in an antic of eyebrows,
raising the flag in surrender to events beyond
their disposal to infer as fate. As opportunity to
rekindle the allure of the maze honeycombing
the simplest of suppositions unspoken.


Reasonably Priced

Rent of attention paid in impulse keeping the beat
out of the midden in the yard. Scouting the relapse
from which fortunes are made to fit coffers with
squeaky wheels. Headlong into the short of it shrunk
to secure passage, its avenue through a heartfelt
racing in the chest. Miniature sureties in swearing to
having taken routes prescribed as medicinal, to feeling
integral to the neighborhood of feeling little but more
of the same. Less the lone in saying what clumps in
the mouth comes round, in a ring tone to the sound
of having lived to allow prudence its turn to rule the
quietude. The acoustic shadow veiling the rhythm to
the carapace of the calling it home.


Sum Days

Having kept the particulars tidy in fossil
fog. Training patience to wait its turn 
rubbing shoulders with a penchant for
friction in the aisles. Rhapsody to the
tenor of battle, for a beachhead in the
desert of fleeting concerns. Footprints in
the font saying welcome with barbed
wire strangling the message. Conquering
to stoop under the burden of having won
the day the weight of the world. Coming
in from the cold child’s play of light,
beaming through a winter’s passage to
find one’s bearings in the haunt. A spate
of convictions the contrary relies upon
for context. The chill’s palsy waltz through
yellow fields of endeavor, to succumb to
the inevitable as one’s own. Gestures
slipping one’s umbra off for the night.
Finagling coordinates with language
in letters affixed with an X that
marks the spot.


Playing Baal

To fill the shoes the clowns keep falling
into. Leaving the puzzle an enigma shy
of perplexing. A cloud’s contention of
clarity. Impeding the progress of discursive
circles saying the secret is safe. Frowned
upon from behind a shield of vagaries.
Numbness deemed freedom calloused
to the pain that comes and goes to work.
Sticking in the armory of cold emotions.
The simultaneously footloose and
entrenched in the aura of an identity,
keeping the book ends of a delusion in
touch.

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