3 poems || John Pursch

Expiration Dates


Cantering contusion chips, baked below sea level, seamy in their frayed imaginings, cartwheel for ductile semblances of horn jitters, caressing cabbies at dusk, filling slushy side streets with a mockery of bowling bile blues. Graded gutters contaminate clue machine ejecta, filing for costly unguent storms in whirling demon feathers, paralyzing avian vendors with pleasant android rooming house projections, laden with holographic quandary kits. Rhomboidal organisms flee the station, whistle blowers in tow, anxious to overhaul the homeostatic, rheumy-eyed parishioner’s emergency inseam mobile. Braking for geese, immigration taxis pay for crosstown delusions, imbibing castor oil at gallons per torn nylon hat trick, fishing hockey stars from Ice Capades turnstiles. Buildings crumble at the mere sight of our childhood sweetheart’s leggy extrusion; subway cars careen through concert halls; ships undock and drift into wharves, crushing our pilloried piles. Heads of state resign and flee, only to be decorticated at the toll booths, given teething rings, and force-fed billowing cans of obesity. Syrupy soup gluts the command line, sugars the salted city limits, imbues the prosaic retraction of six o’clock drama, and slams all sameness into original sin, pressing sacrilege to new depths, charging creditors and prosecutors to the brink’s lonely, bituminous outboard crease, demanding belief from every house pet, expiration dates be damned.





Rewrite


Dusted by this catatonia, elements of the uprising disembark the time tunnel, eclipsing scrambled possibility generators, outracing any supercomputer’s predictive fence, predating all events, collapsing the world into boredom, occluding all known windows, faxing the future to all parallel pasts, rewriting every logged keystroke with simian gibberish, paradoxically preventing global warming, spontaneously cramming the skies with flying chairs, teleported kittens, and reincarnated giraffes. Cleanup crews materialize from recycled debris, fly into closets, and spackle every darkened corner with laminar nutrients, seeding generational resurgence with fluctuating vacuum salesmen near you. Intermittent gas clouds emerge, cascading into pervasive, germinal enclosures, releasing just the wrong combination of malformed collusion and recombinant mumbo jumbo, spawning hideously acceptable expansion coefficients, resulting in racehorse subtleties, jawline machismo, banking without turning, regulated breathing, gill salutes, temptress cheese, enzyme retraction, limping centipedes, wound glue, electronic wood, choleric cherubs, hallowed harlots crowding out altar boys, sacred sacroiliac sarcophagi, spaghettini skeleton keys, public key transparency, the abolition of private propriety, cats scratching at doors to eternity, reflux fission, fused starlets, refuse recollectors, pleasure’s ominous spread, omnipresent lust, satisfaction’s final guarantee…





Embtial, Spontior Croot


Arumena plenterfeil, a chobbler of nieth,
engamaline frontermun, entombling chort,
ackuvian hapecoat, corregian smoor,
arshimle and porticene,
ontumial chesterhock tremp.

O sulician horrier! O inchembile durise!
En furengient octobular wronk in jemile malize!

Toog a gramble of whexerman phrank,
a gippontie clemt jamure;
orch ein spoogley turmen taphleek,
peramel and gleeter pajore.

In spemil, on crabble, of tenter and cheener daloop;
if whooden carample or jarion eart,
er gaminal pheat con parunial, embtial, spontior croot.